Poetry

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Lament for America

by Lionel E. Deimel

 

Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, has lost her luster,

And Lady Liberty weeps for want of freedom,

Her torch of enlightenment no longer a beacon to the world.

The Mother of Exiles no longer welcomes the masses,

And those who accepted her welcome find it withdrawn.

 

Columbia is stricken with a dreadful sickness from within,

An affliction emanating from the district that bears her name,

A place where wisdom is replaced by the vagaries of a jester.

Athena is despised, and Eris delights in her chaos.

 

Columbia’s friends are scorned and her enemies courted.

Her pride in her myriad accomplishments in science and medicine

Turns to dust as researchers desert her shores.

Her concern for those in need in foreign lands

Is seen no longer as a virtue worthy of her.

Even the needy of her own are being forgotten,

Lest the wealthy be denied the comfort of additional largesse.

 

Columbia’s compassionate helping hand is withdrawn

And replaced by one that inflicts deliberate cruelty.

Anxiety and stress are felt across the land,

Speaking the truth becomes a heroic act,

And women with child fear an unexpected outcome.

The rule of law can no longer be taken for granted,

And the party of a judge may determine a case’s outcome.

Innocents are threatened, and the guilty are released from prison.

 

The prolonged journey to create a more perfect Union

Has halted and begun a return to a benighted past.

Fickle Providence may no longer favor our undertaking,

And the promised new order of the ages may ultimately have failed.


I thought of writing this poem after reading the Bible’s Book of Lamentations. I had been reading the Old Testament systematically, and reading Lamentations happened to come up in May 2025. It seemed natural to lament the destruction of American democracy, just as Jeremiah (or whoever wrote the book) lamented the destruction of Jerusalem. I wrote a first draft of the poem on 6/6/2025. I revised the poem over the next few days, largely finishing it by 6/10/2025. One word was changed on 6/16/2025. On 6/17/2025, I added a line and made a few additional alterations to make the poem read more smoothly.

This poem draws on some of the same ideas as the earlier poem “Lost Faith in America, November 2024.” That poem was written shortly after Donald Trump was elected president for the second time. When I wrote it, I could only imagine how horrible a president Trump would be in a second term. As it happens, my imagination could not fully comprehend the disaster that had befallen the nation. “Lament for America” was written after that tragedy had become more fully apparent.

Readers will, no doubt, see that “Lamentation” is more carefully constructed than the earlier poem. Although the poem does not employ rhyme, and line lengths and meter vary, each line contains five metrical feet.

The first line of the poem was indeed written first, but I cannot say exactly why it occurred to me. For some reason, I was thinking of the song “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” which once served as an unofficial national anthem. (I sang the song in elementary school out of the songbook Twice 55 Plus Community Songs, a volume dating from 1919, a copy of which I may have in my music library somewhere.) Invoking Columbia (Lady Columbia or Miss Columbia) was  fortuitous, in that it helped structure the poem. Columbia has served as a female personification of the United States. (An image of  Columbia is seen at the beginning of every movie from Columbia Pictures.) Images of the Statue of Liberty (Lady Liberty or the Goddess of Liberty) have largely replaced Columbia in American iconography, though Columbia did not deserve to be so supplanted. Anyway, the next four lines focus on the Statue of Liberty and draw from Emma Lazarus’s famous poem.

Much of the next three stanzas is easily understood in the context of the first few months of the second administration of Donald Trump, the jester of the second stanza. Athena, of course, is the Greek goddess of wisdom, and Eris is the Greek goddess of strife and discord. (I think of her as the goddess of chaos.) The line about women with child was intended to refer to worries about receiving appropriate medical care in the case of a pregnancy gone wrong.

The final stanza references the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, and the two Latin mottos on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States: “Annuit cśptis” and “Novus ordo seclorum.”

— LED, 6/17/2025

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