Lafayette, you came
when our cause coincided with your own,
and we forgave your perfidious past
to create a better future.
It was an acceptable accommodation
that avoided bankruptcy
while paying dividends to both mortgagees.
That future included favorable trades,
reparations for war,
and allotments to impoverished dignity.
That future inspired rebellion of oppression,
succor of exiles,
and restorative alliances.
Lafayette, you gave us a statue
commemorating liberty,
as your colonialism quashed freedom abroad,
and licensed libertinism at home.
Your culture is world famous
for inventing champagne and the bidet.
You subsist on snails and frog legs,
string potatoes and rotten cheese,
and hamburgers consumed with utensils
... just to defy the Earl of Sandwich.
You have insulated your schools,
starved your artists and thinkers,
and lost every war of the modern era.
We proclaimed: Lafayette, we are here.
when your republic had no other recourse;
but hundreds of thousands of allied corpses
are rattling in their foreign graves,
shamed by your faithless duplicity,
and longing to obey your exhortation: Yankee, go home!
What geneticists say about inbreeding is true
as evinced by your repeated loss
of the noblest flower of your national youth.
Lafayette, your account is overdrawn.
You can never repay us,
but don't ever ask for credit again.
by O. Henrietta Porter
... who is the mother of a soldier, the wife of a soldier, and
the daughter of soldiers back to the American Revolution; and
whose compositions have appeared in various newsletters,
magazines, and chapbooks.
