Tent City Poem by Elliott Rosenberg

Where have all the pilgrims gone?
Where have all the Quakers gone?
West. Towards native land.
To daub the wattle,
To erect vernacular meetinghouses with gabled door hoods.

Where have all the natives gone?
West of the missouri,
to Oklahoma and beyond,
To black hills laden in gold,
To prairies where the harvest is galore.

But what of the promise at old fort Laramie,
That gave us land to erect a tepee.
Along came the white man and reneged,
Bellowed fire and consumed the treaty.

What about the slave. The black man with no rights.
With acerbity does he desire freedom.
To become a sharecropper.
Only to succumb to Jim Crow laws,
As he is carried out west on a chain gang.

Sometimes the immigrant migrates east,
As a salmon to its nesting ground.
Chinese railroad workers mollified,
Along Italian birds of passage resettled.

And what about the Catholics. The Jews. The Irish and the pagan.
All shadowed by kings and queens.
Product of wars and emancipations.
The Hindus brought ashrams,
And the Muslims tents.

And so I stand today.
And I ask myself.
Where is my tent.?