If you somehow weren’t offended by acting Citizenship and Immigration Services director Ken Cuccinelli’s reworking of Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” maybe you need to take a look at My Anthology of English Poetry, which Cuccinelli’s boss has been composing in his spare time (while he’s not breaking up families and putting children in detention centers):
George Gordon Byron (1788–1824)
“She Walks in Beauty”
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And if she wasn’t my daughter
I’d date her.
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The Second Coming”
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem, where we’re opening five new steel plants,
folks,
because China has been dumping steel all over the U.S.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Sonnet 132
Then will I swear beauty herself is black
And all they foul that thy complexion lack
Because I am the least racist person there is
Anywhere in the world.
Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The Road Not Taken”
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
Because no one has done more for
Infrastructure than I have, no one.
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
“Hope Is the Thing with Feathers”
I’ve heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet—never—in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of me.
What a stupid question—
You ask really stupid—questions.
Ted Heller is an Editor at Large for AIR MAIL