[Vision2020] Praise Song for the Day

[Tom Hansen]

The Inaugural Poem . . .

"Praise Song for the Day"
By Elizabeth Alexander

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH6fC3W3YvA
  
"Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each 
others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. 
All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our 
ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in 
a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on 
an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your 
pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or 
declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then 
others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's 
something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we 
cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead 
who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked 
the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices 
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every 
hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. 
Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt 
grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any 
sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward 
in that light."

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
 
"For a lapsed Lutheran born-again Buddhist pan-Humanist Universalist 
Unitarian Wiccan Agnostic like myself there's really no reason ever to go 
to work."

- Roy Zimmerman


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