[Vision2020] City Council and the Pledge

[Melynda Huskey]

Warren, you've inspired me.

>From now on, I want the City Council *and* the County Commissioners--heck, Dan, the Highway Commission, too, and P&Z, and the Idaho State Senate and House, and every school board in the State--to open with each member reading or reciting a poem.   

Now there's a practice with real utility to citizens, and a chance for elected officials to impress us voters.  I guarantee you'll learn more about your representative from her or his choice of poetry over a couple of months than you would from listening to them mumble or trumpet through the Pledge.

Elected officials, if you're listening, what would you choose as an inaugural verse?

Melynda Huskey

P.S.  Although I haven't run for public office since my failed attempt to secure the grad rep position on the Ohio State University English Department's Graduate Studies Committee, I've always got a poem ready.  For today:

Those Winter Sundays
Robert Hayden
(The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, 261)

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labour in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze.  No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
Of love's austere and lonely offices?