Isle of Hope, Isle of Tears

(this song is beautiful, and offers an adventure for the heart into the history of your ancestors if they, like mine, are from Ireland.>




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 the 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 I 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 her 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,
'cause there's no future in the past when you're fifteen years.

When they closed down Ellis Island in nineteen forty-three
Seventeen million people had come there for sanctuary.
And in the springtime when I came here and stepped onto its piers,
I thought of how it must have felt when you're only fifteen years.



The Isle of home is always on your mind.