Corita Kent

Transcribed Text: You Shoot at Yourself, America Freedom to Kill The color of the Statue of Liberty grows ever more deathly pale as, loving freedom with bullets you shoot at yourself, America. You can kill yourself this way! It is dangerous to go out into this hellish world, but it is still more dangerous to hide in the bushes. There is a smell on earth of a universal Dallas, it is frightful to live and this fright is shameful. Who is going to believe hippocritical fairy tales, when, behind a facade of noble ideas the price of revolver lubricant rises and the price of human life falls? Murderers attend funerals dressing in mourning, and later become stockholders, and once again, ears of grain filled with bullets wave in the fields of Texas. The eyes of murderers peer out alike from under hats and caps, the steps of murderers are heard at all doorways, and a second of the Kennedys falls... America, save your children! The children of other countries turn gray, and their huts bombed in the night, burn in your fire, just like your Bill of Rights. You promised to be the conscience of the world, but, at the brink of bottomless shame, you are shooting not at King, but at your own conscience. You are bombing Vietnam and with this your own honor. When a nation is going dangerously insane, it cannot be cured of its troubles by hastily prescribed calm. Perhaps the only help is shame. History cannot be cleansed in a laundry. There are no such washing machines blood can never be washed away! O where is it hiding, the shame of the nation, as if it were a runaway Negro? The slaves are within the slaves. There are many unfettered murderers. They carry out their mob justice, pogroms, and Raskolnikov wanders through America, insane, with a bloody ax. Hey, Old Abe what are people doing, understanding vilely only one truth: that the greatness of a tree can be assessed only after it is felled. Lincoln basks in his marble chair, wounded. They are shooting at him again! What beasts. The stars in your flag, America, are like bullet holes. Arise from the dead, bullet-pierced Statue of Liberty, murdered so many times and speak out like a woman and mother and curse the freedom to kill. But without wiping the splashes of blood from your forehead you, Statue of Liberty, have raised up your green, drowned woman's face, appealing to the heavens against being trodden under foot. Yevgerny Yevtushenko