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# The Frantic Invisible Night
- URL: https://www.andyposner.org/frantic-invisible-night-1500-children-separated-families-border/
- Published: 2018-05-27T15:23:43.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-15T05:03:10.000Z
- Description: They’ve separated 5,500 children. No, they’ve discarded them like cans of Coca-Cola, 5,500 children who reached our shore like sea foam, salty, crying salt...
- Author: Andy
- Tags: America on the Brink, poetry, America, Politics, protest, #Migrated-1784090317409, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-07-15 04:39

They’ve [separated 5,500 children](https://www.npr.org/2022/08/10/1116738450/how-the-family-separation-policy-came-to-be?ref=andyposner.org).  
No, they’ve discarded them  
like cans of Coca-Cola,  
5,500 children who reached our shore  
like sea foam, salty, crying salt,  
a column of families marching for asylum,  
tangled in the seaweed of fear,  
5,500 children taken away  
because the border is where,  
like a maternity ward,  
ideology meets blood.

They care for fetuses but not brown babies  
dead of dehydration  
or hysterical, crying *Mama*, *Papa*,  
they destroy the water jugs  
scattered like leaking life rafts  
in the desert ocean  
that stretches from Tijuana  
to the District of Columbia,  
and the brown children's faces  
briefly light up in the light  
of the Cities on the Hill  
before they disappear  
into a frantic invisible night.

On Ellis Island they changed names  
to make it easier to pronounce them—  
Mine was Pozniak, now it’s Posner,  
yes, much easier, much neater—  
at least we pronounced them,  
what are the names of these children?  
No child is nameless, no child illegal!

They’ve stolen the honey of children  
to manufacture their diabetic propaganda:  
the soda-can-American-Dream!

See, America is the land that without irony  
sells cigarettes and Nicotine gum  
and diet pills and Coca-Cola  
side-by-side at the checkout counter:  
What becomes of a people immune to irony?

Ah, but they don’t mind  
the children when they grow up,  
gardeners, nannies, cooks, field hands, factory workers,  
nor do they mind 5,500 children  
locked in cages, barcoded,  
scanned like soda  
sold for a profit at Walmart.

I mind.  
My grandfather was  
sent to the Gulag  
for being Jewish,  
others gassed to death:  
How is this not the start  
of a Star-Spangled Holocaust?

Listen, listen, listen.  
Lady Liberty’s torch, once doused,  
will not with ease re-ignite.  
Already she vomits,  
her dress is covered in vomit,  
her arm grows weary,  
the waters creep up her torso  
like a rising tide of vipers,  
but still the light burns,  
still the light lights up  
the frantic invisible night.

Somewhere 5,500 children  
cower in desolation,  
mothers and fathers  
sob like exploding stars  
wailing comet-tears for all to see.

And I too wail, I too am frantic  
because in the night things happen  
that neither history nor children  
will or can or should forgive.