Isle of Hope

Ellis Island , New York (Kopie)

was the place of longing for migrants from Europe between 1892 and 1943, fleeing hunger, war and political persecution in the hope of finding a better life in America.

Fifteen-year-old Annie Moore from Ireland was the first to make the journey. Brendan Graham's song tries to capture her inner experience.

And many of today's migrants are likely to experience something similar.

On the first day of January Eighteen ninety-two
They opened Ellis Island and they let the people through
And the first to cross the threshold of that Isle of hope and tears
Was Annie Moore from Ireland who was only fifteen years

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

When they closed down Ellis Island in Nineteen Fourty-Three
Seventeen million people had come there for Sanctuary
And in the springtime when I came there I stepped onto it′s piers
I thought of how it must have been when you're fifteen years

back