Hail Columbia
A Prayer for My People On Our Independence Day
Hail Columbia, you who are borne of and born with my people, our sister and our mother.
You have overseen the greatest flowering of a people in an astrological age. Under your tutelage we hacked a great civilization from the wilds with little but our bare hands. You guided us as we watered New World soil with our blood and our tears; you urged us onward as we buried our first generations in strange new cemeteries. Against impossible odds and the ire of the greatest powers on Earth you led us forth from poverty and persecution into the glad realm of self-determination.
Mother Columbia, I am the daughter of your original children from the settlements of the Penn’s Woods colony. You were with them as they cleared forests and broke ground for cultivation for the first time. You were with them when they threw off the yoke of British Empire. You guided their hands as they wrote our founding documents in Philadelphia. You know the cemeteries where they are buried along the west bank of the great Delaware River. You know their descendants, my extended family of farmers and laborers and coal miners and soldiers, throughout the Lehigh Valley and the Pocono Mountains. I am of the remnant of your children in the land of your, and our, origin.
Mother Columbia, eternally fresh of face, pink of cheek, clear of blue eye, your children have been led astray. Your vigor has been hijacked and channeled into unseemly progress, progress wholly destructive of the self-determination to which you led us in our youth. We have been infiltrated and occupied by a rival empire of deceit and corruption. We have become the food of vampires. Our babies — your babies — are being stolen from us in the fog of unspoken war to become the feast of monsters. Your childrens’ minds have been bent to despair, their bodies poisoned into subjugation. Through deafening spectacle they have been convinced to take up the guilt of another, and thereby to relinquish the liberty to which you led us all those generations ago. If they continue to progress in this unwholesome direction, they will surely die.
Oh great Columbia, on this anniversary of our Independence, our birthday and yours, I come before you with all the determination and optimism of my ancestors before me. We find ourselves once again navigating a vast wilderness. We find ourselves once again surrounded by hostiles hiding under cover of darkness, awaiting the opportunity to strike us down in our innocent trust.
I ask that you guide us into a new direction of progress, a direction worthy of both you and your children. I ask that you renew in us an understanding of the greatness we have accomplished under your tutelage. As you once guided us out from under the yoke of an overt empire, I ask that you guide us again, this time out from under the yoke of a covert empire. Remove from our eyes the blinders of guilt and despair. Restore in us our vision and direct our gaze toward a new direction of progress. Allow us to see the opportunities in our new wilderness, and strengthen our bones and our minds with your vitality to set upon our new and righteous path toward the reaccomplishment of our liberty.
I ask that you protect us, as you protected us in the beginning, as we take our first wobbly steps toward our new future. I ask that your strength and vigor be upon us again, and I ask that you release us from falsely-induced oaths that have led us down this path of destruction.
Mother Columbia, on offer to you for your benevolence toward your children, is all the greatness of America in both her first manifestation and the manifestation to come. Your dynamism and endurance will not be forgotten or overlooked. You will live on in every step of our progress toward liberty. The autonomy you help us secure will free us to once again create art and monuments in your honor, without threat of destruction by hostile others.
Hail Columbia, our mother and sister. May your spirit renew within us and become once again a beacon of light to your besieged children. ❧