The Wall that Trump Built

A dystopian cumulative tale by Robbie Gamble

This is the wall that Trump built.

This is the base that supported the wall that Trump built.

This is the anger that stirred up the base that supported the wall that Trump built.

These are the migrants, the “rapists and thugs,” such a shadowy danger disturbing the base that supported the wall that Trump built.

This is the border, impossibly long, so porous and broken, allowing the migrants to enter the shadows and rile up the base that demanded the wall that Trump built.

This is a trade deal, it’s complex and cruel: It regulates cross-border movement of goods, forcing loopholes and quotas to broker an edge for tycoons with free assets, ignoring the base that turned out for the wall that Trump built.

These are the jobs in old factories and plants that were culled out through high economic design, pushing robots or outsourcing, labor be damned! Low-skilled workers get broken and pushed to the edge by tycoons who contemptuously leaned on their base to deliver the wall that Trump built.

Now look! Here comes the scapegoating, racist and raw, pumping Rust Belt resentment through cynical rants, perpetrated by pundits decreeing false fears of the Muslim, or Mexican, wild-eyed and brown, terrorizing communities over the edge of what once “made us great,” now an insecure race, huddled back of the wall that Trump built.

And this is our hemisphere, wary and sore, home to natives, conquistadors, entrepreneurs, and then waves upon waves of the tired and poor, out of steerage, from bondage, from privilege too. An evolving community, fractious yet proud; wracked with growing pains, now on a small-minded course. Will we go it alone? You can see it from space: that raw scar of a wall that Trump built.

Robbie Gamble’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Scoundrel Time, Solstice, RHINO, Pangyrus, and Poet Lore. He was the winner of the 2017 Carve Poetry prize. He works as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston, Massachusetts.

Trumpty Dumpty image from the U.S. Library of Congress.