Isle of Hope, Isle of Tears

Isle of Hope, Isle of Tears was written by Brendan Graham, who also did the lyrics of Josh Groban's You Raise Me Up. The song revolves around Ellis Island, which served as the route for millions of immigrants to the United States from 1892 to 1954. Graham's song is so melancholic, that if you are not moved by it, you are either dead or obtunded. I have this nagging pain in my chest everytime I hear this song:

Celtic Woman

On the first day on January,

Eighteen ninety-two,

They opened Ellis Island and they let

The people through.

And the first to cross the treshold

Of that isle of hope and tears,

Was Annie Moore from Ireland

Who was all of fifteen years.

CHORUS:

Isle of hope, isle of tears,

Isle of freedom, isle of fears,

But it's not the isle you left behind.

That isle of hunger, isle of pain,

Isle you'll never see again

But the isle of home is always on your mind.

In a little bag she carried

All her past and history,

And her dreams for the future

In the land of liberty.

And courage is the passport

When your old world disappears

But there's no future in the past

When you're fifteen years

Chorus:

When they closed down Ellis Island

In nineteen fourty-three,

Seventeen million people

Had come there for sanctuary.

And in Springtime when I came here

And I stepped onto it's piers,

I thought of how it must have been

When you're fifteen years.

Today the island, largely artificially created through landfill, is situated on the New Jersey side of the Upper New York bay. The natural portion of the island, part of New York City, is surrounded by rest of the island in Jersey City. For sometime Ellis Island was subject to a dispute of who really has jurisdiction over it - New York or New Jersey. Then came a 1998 Supreme Court decision ,which found  most of the island to be part of New Jersey.

My family had gone through its own Ellis-Island-experience, although not as difficult as Annie Moore's or the few percentage who were declined. The chorus lines are very true to me. The American dream is for everybody who would like a better life for his family. The hard part is to go  through the process. There will be no shortcuts.

We left our country in 2006, full of hopes for a better future. With the hope came along the fears, of rejection and failure. Will we ever succeed? What is in store? There was a sense of liberation from a difficult life, but along came a feeling of ambivalence. Will I ever see my country and my loved ones again? I never really stopped thinking of home since I got here. My refuge are the tears that I cry. The isle of home is always on my mind. With that constant  torment I will find solace in Celtic Woman's voices.