[Vision2020] City Council and the Pledge

[keely emerinemix]

Kudos to Warren, a poem for Melynda and all of you -- one I've shared on the 
list before, by the magnificent American poet Countee Cullen:

She even thinks that up in Heaven
Her class lies late and snores
While poor Black cherubs rise at seven
To do celestial chores

Spoken with the force of an Old Testament prophet and utterly relevant today 
--

keely


From: Melynda Huskey <melyndahuskey at earthlink.net>
Reply-To: Melynda Huskey <melyndahuskey at earthlink.net>
To: Warren Hayman <whayman at adelphia.net>, Phil Nisbet 
<pcnisbet1 at hotmail.com>
CC: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] City Council and the Pledge
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 22:09:37 -0800 (GMT-08:00)

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?


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