they haven’t come to learn anything
but to recover something,
to participate in something particularly theirs,

some indelible trace of their story

something that is part of their common memory
and that in their innermost self has forged
their consciousness of being American

as for the rest, we can only try to imagine it,
deducing it from what has survived and been preserved,
from what has been saved from destruction
and oblivion

and the question can at last be asked: what did this place
mean to all those who passed through it

what quantities of hope, expectation, daring,
enthusiasm, and energy were accumulated here

rather than simply saying: in thirty years
sixteen million emigrants passed through Ellis Island

attempting to give palpable form
to what those sixteen million individual stories were,
the sixteen million stories, identical and distinct,
of the men, women, and children driven
from their native land by famine or poverty,
or by political, racial, or religious oppression,
leaving everything behind — village, family, friends —
taking months and years to set aside
the money needed for the trip,
finding themselves here, in a hall so vast that they never
would have dared imagine that there could anywhere
exist so big a place,
lined up by fours,
waiting their turn

the point is not to have pity, but understanding

four emigrants out of five
spent no more than a few hours on Ellis Island

it was really nothing more than an innocuous formality,
the time needed to change an emigrant into an immigrant,
someone who had left into someone who had arrived,

but to every one of those
who marched past the doctors and immigration officers,
what was at stake was vital:

they had given up their past and their history,
they had given up everything for the sake of coming here
to try and live a life they were forbidden to live
in their native land:
and now they were face to face with an inexorable finality

what we see today is a chaotic assemblage of things,
the remnants of alterations, demolitions,
and restorations

objects piled helter-skelter, stacks of gratings,
sections of scaffolding, junked spotlights

tables, desks, rusted lockers, and
filing cabinets, bedsteads, bits of wood,
benches, rolls of tarpaper,
everything and anything:
a large saucepan, a sieve,
a mobile fire pump, a coffee pot, an adding machine,
an electric fan, glass jars, cafeteria trays,
lead piping, a wheelbarrow, the remains of a hand truck,
unfilled forms, a hymnal,
paper cups, some kind of board game.

Ellis Island was ravaged
not only by time,
dampness, and salt air
but by plunder:
for almost twenty years, the little island, no longer in use
and left virtually unguarded, was systematically ransacked
by dealers in scrap metal, who came looking for materials
that were growing more valuable with every passing year:
brass from faucets and doorknobs,
zinc from the roofing,
lead from the plumbing,
wrought iron from banisters,
bronze from lamp stands and overhead lights,
they took everything they could pile onto their boats,
leaving to rot where they lay the masses of furniture,
the piles of mattresses and rusty bedsprings,
the mounds of burst pillows