In honor of MLK!

who built the bridges, laid the tracks, dug foundations?

Photo by J. Harrington

There is little we could add to Langston Hughes' words on this day. It's past time for this country to stop electing or honoring racists! It's time to

Let America Be America Again

Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? 
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free?  Not me?
Surely not me?  The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

Winter play

Much of the day the air has been filled with snowflakes. Sometimes more, sometimes less, drifting down to a frozen ground. We just refilled the sunflower seed feeders in from and behind the house. Chickadees, white breasted nuthatches, hairy woodpeckers, blue jays and a handful of squirrels have been enjoying the bounty. Soon the snowflakes will turn to water drops. It's only 45 days until meteorological Spring; 295 days until mid-term elections; and, 22 days until the local DFL caucus.

bread looks good, but how does it taste?

Photo by J. Harrington

Meanwhile, we spent part of the morning baking another boule of sourdough bread. We must have been distracted last night while making the dough because, when first "finished," it was much too moist and loose. We thought we had properly weighed each of the ingredients but the results were not what we expected, so we gradually added more flour until the dough came to resemble what we thought it should. We'll see tonight when we taste it and see if it actually baked all the way through. The old baker's advice to "watch the dough, not the clock" should, for at least some of us, start with "Pay attention!" At least today's loaf looks pretty.

playing with nymphs

Photo by J. Harrington

After the bread came out of the oven and was on the cooling rack, we started playing with some new fly-fishing nymphs we received a week or so ago. They're small enough that we ended up buying a pair of bent-nose jewelers pliers to insert and remove them from the foam strips in our fly box. The next time we end up with a touch of cabin fever, we'll take those nymphs out again and flatten the hook barbs. Somehow, over the past decade or so, we've managed to drift away from hitting local streams regularly and now are in the process of rediscovering how much fun we used to have, even in the "off" season, messing with tackle and flies and such. As the temperatures get closer to freezing, instead of sub-zero, we may even take another shot at Winter fly-fishing. We'll see if having wading boots without felt soles helps keep snow from putting us on mini-stilts as we hike toward the water.

Why Regret?

Galway Kinnell, 1927 - 2014

Didn’t you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren’t you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn’t it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn’t you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster’s New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn’t it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid’s ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
“The perfected lover does not eat.”
As a child, didn’t you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn’t you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren’t you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring’s offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn’t it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.