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      May 11, 2025Carrie Jane BondRound Them Up

      Family With 2 US Citizen Children
      Deported by ICE After Traffic Stop
      Cheerios, dinner plates, wedding
      Rings—teapots and targets. Eyes
      On the circumference of your wrist.
      On a round table in my classroom
      With broken chairs: the globe.
       
      Holes punched in the left margin, being
      Left at the margins, not knowing:
      Will knuckles rattle their doors,
      Their shiny knobs bright, like that
      Once-new promise of America?
       
      Her torch blazes in the noonday sun
      Before, during, after the election
      From the island where she stands
      With eyes hooded and low, ever
      Watching over rough waters.
       
      I tell this mother on the phone
      From our classroom, cord curling ’round
      My fingers, we will do our best. They can
      Stand out there and press the doorbell,
      Ring forever for all we care.
       
      I am not worried, she assures me.
      Yet there is no list it is safe to be on—
      Everything being less sure. She is
      Less assured now, the news rolling
      On a twenty-four-hour cycle.
       
      A knock at the door is a knock
      In their hearts, thoughts spinning
      Round and round
      Like the vultures’ turning—silent
      Above the wide-open plain.
       

      from Poets Respond

      Carrie Jane Bond

      “‘Family With 2 US Citizen Children Deported by ICE After Traffic Stop’ is one of several headlines I have seen this week as ICE continues arresting and deporting Americans at a furious pace. As I work with children, some of whom are multilingual English learners, I have felt the ripples of fear in these communities most vulnerable to such blunt attacks. Attempts to round up those who are deemed ‘illegal’ is continuing despite errors, illegality, and an optics of horrifying cruelty. I am responding from my own outrage, that ‘give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ has given way to such headlines. I hope we as a country can remember who we are, or rather who we strive to be, and to remember what James Baldwin wrote oh so many years ago: ‘They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law — in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.’”

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