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MONDAY
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Polaroid photo by Edward McKuen, August
2002 ©2002 by Stanyan Music Group. All rights reserved.
A Thought for Today
I hope whatever labor you're engaged in
today is a labor of love and if not, why not?
Take the day off, you’ve earned it.
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ROD McKUEN
CONCERTS
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Labor Day
(USA, Canada)
Laurindo Almeida o
Cleveland Amory o
Romare Beardon o
Terry Bradshaw o
Marge Champion o
Jimmy Connors o
Allen Drury o
Mark Harmon o
Selma Hayek o
Lennox Lewis o
Christa McAuliffe o
Martha Mitchell o
Linda Purl o
Keanu Reeves o
Peter Ueberroth o
Giovanni Verga |
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Nothing is more beautiful than work completed.
There is great dignity in labor.
No day given to work is lost.
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AMERICAN LANGUAGE |
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American names go rolling off the tongue
like rivers of rain down silver sidings
Chippewa and Idaho, Connecticut and Maine,
California, Arkansas, Georgia and Seattle.
Like stairs climbed often they lead us upward,
forward, even onward
Wisconsin, Savannah, Corpus Christi, Kansas City.
Not just great states and awesome cities
but nicknames, too, ring out -
Yankee, Buckeye, Hoosier, and High Pockets.
More color finds its way into our speech
than all the Arizona sunsets.
Wolverine and Wahoo, Beaver Dam and Boulder Dam.
Sometimes it seems as though collectors
in Salvation Army uniforms
complete with tambourines
hiked across the land
picking this word up and dropping that
until a cornucopia of thoughts became so full
it overflowed and spit out sentences
that started an evolutionary dictionary.
Consider the rivers.
Mississippi, Allegheny, and the River Platt.
The lakes like Erie, Huron and Mead
the waters that somersault over Niagara.
Consider the names of American tribes
the true pioneers who founded this land
Chattahoochee, Arapaho, Navajo, Crow,
Comanche, Chickasaw, Chapolapec, Sioux.
And Spain by way of Mexico
charged in and changed the old vocabularies
from squared-off English to American
Caliente comes to mind and Amarillo
and all the names derived from saints -
San Angelo and San Francisco, Santa Barbara
and Saint Pete.
Some settlers brought their own names
out of Europe
contributing and distributing
a spate of words so spacious
that to list them would be just to make a list.
Pride from mother countries came
and with them Little Italy,
Chinatown, New Orleans, and New England.
The slang that ambled out of Africa -
honed in Harlem, washed in Watts -
now stretches coast to crowded coast
like some new copper pipeline.
But the continent itself let go of words
that ring like sleigh bells
clang like cymbals
beat like drumming
and blast the ear like God's own trumpets.
Few states within the States
do not have resting-places
that when said aloud
provoke a conversation.
Cathedral Gorge in Utah, California's Capistrano,
The Poconos, Tuckahoe, and Tonawanda.
Rivers, tribes and mountain peaks
cities and the plains
meet and mix in mad profusion
till who's to say - not history books -
which came first, the tribe or river
the tribesman called his home.
It is a rich and ruddy language
full of sweet and salty talk,
one that should be held aloft as badge and banner..
It even sounds good mispronounced.
And where but in America
could weaponry contribute ?
Bazooka, Tommy, the Gattling gun
and Sunday Musket.
As we survey the now no longer
distant stars
and count the new heads
still on their way
to seek out freedom here,
so many words of wonder brush the ear
that dictionaries in the making
die on publication date.
Every day some new word stops,
looks around, then settles in the land.
A poet, among other things, should help protect
his country's language.
Even as he versifies, he adds,
subtracts and multiplies.
This poem, then, inspired by the land
the love and luck of living here
observing and conserving words
is by necessity and not neglect
to be continued.
What I've left out this time 'round
I'll pick up another - and another
until the time when speech
with new words being added
is drawn and done and ending.
But since a language has no ends
and no beginnings
I'll be long in dust before it's over.
I charge new bards to take it up
these remarks and this go-round
add, amplify, and explain away
the talk they hear that no book
nor The Daily News
picks up and uses.
And for every metaphor she adds
and for every adjective he chooses
drops an older one that's worn
or wasn't right enough to find
its place upon the tongue
the first time out.
- from "The Power Bright And
Shining", 1980 |
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