Bring me your tired
Bring me your hungry and your poor
So we came
Huddled our families into commercial jet-planes
Skipped our rocks across oceans
Picked them up on western shores
Stacked them into homes
Built the ceilings as high as our credit scores
Became nurses
Became doctors and engineers
             real-estate brokers and devout Catholics
And we never looked back
Liberty's beacon of hope shining so bright before us
We anchored ourselves at her feet
Called ourselves citizen and
Left nothing behind but
The stretching shadow of our past
Tugging at our heels with their empty stomachs
The typhoons coursing through their veins
The mudslides swiped on their cheeks
The rattling of aluminum rooftops pounding beside their heartbeat

The American Dream
Doesn't allow us to think of such things
The anthem we used to sing
Becoming so easy to forget
The Philippine soil beneath our nails
Being wiped clean by
Health benefits and credit card debt
Quick to write checks to pay off our guilt
Learn to swallow perfect English until
Every hint of our accent is washed from our throat
Create a language barrier so tall
The pleading voices on the other side
Is a dialect we don't recognize as our own, but

Who can ignore the hunger?
Who can ignore the rumbling of stomachs that echo from home?
The weight of their bellies heavy from swallowing stones
They search for Jesus in our eyes that we may
Turn those stones to bread

...but we chose to remain silent instead.

As if the floodwaters could never reach our doors
As if we can't imagine having to be the father
Protecting his family from the storm
Praying that the roof isn't as frail as his spirit
Try pretending not to hear it
When a twelve-year-old girl holds her screams when
The shame

Rips through her womb as
Destructive as the tourist that paid her
Imagine her mother
Having to wash that bloody skirt in the river
Her tears falling into the current
Brought over to our beaches with the morning tide

Have you never stopped to question why
The ocean always taste salty?
Have you never wondered
How many bodies could be found at the bottom of canals?

Taste it:
The way malnutrition settles on the mouth like unheard prayers
The way dehydration makes it impossible to shed tears to show how much they hurt

Because while we
Button up our shirts and
Straighten our crooked ties
We can’t hear them pounding our doors from the other side saying
Be careful whom you impress
Because the most sure-fire way to oppress a people
Is to convince them to imitate and adopt
The cultures and values of those who oppress, so

Can you see them when you dress?
Can you hear their silence as loud as your conscience?
Muffled by the mountains of garbage
Lost beneath a parent's broken smile

It still speaks to the heart inside us
How it’s stitched together by the loose strings of our flag
Held by the frail fingers we’ve left behind
They tug
Hoping to pull us back home
They wait
Sitting on the steps of rice terraces
Writing our names in the soil to bring us closer to our roots

We have to return
Bring back everything we've learned
Carry them like rocks on our backs and
Stack the stones
Until the hunger doesn't rumble
Until the tables are set
Until the children's laughter rises into
Anthems we will no longer forget
Stack the stones
Rebuild a nation to stand on its own
Show the world our people have backbones
Tell Lady Liberty
We no longer need to bring you
Our tired, our hungry and our poor
We can take care of that from
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