SOME OF THE BEST
Monday, 31 May 1999. Click
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Photo by Bob Gentry ©2001
Stanyan Entertainment
A Thought for Today
Live for those who didn’t. We will all
see each other in the next life soon enough.
MEMORIAL
DAY, 1999
When I was a child we called
this Decoration Day. It was that special day of the year we took flowers
and flags to veterans cemeteries and soldiers fields to decorate the
graves and monuments of those who had fallen in defense of their country.
Our Country. Almost nothing has changed but the name of the holiday
–almost. What has changed is the number of graves of mostly young men who
died so that we can live and pursue the ideals of freedom.
Today is also the 180th Birthday of the good great poet Walt Whitman.
Whitman wrote better than anyone about the American experience, he even
dressed the wounds of Union soldiers in tent hospitals.
Today’s poems and random thoughts are from my 1980 book “The Power Bright
& Shining.” It has the following dedication.
“ . . . the genius of the United States is not best or most in its
ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, not even in its
newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the common people. “
-Walt Whitman
from the original edition of
“Leaves of Grass, published in 1855
Parading the Colors
Red should not always stand for blood
not even that spilled by our fathers
and our sons
in the great parade of wars with numbers
one.
two.
three ?
Red is a sunset color
a painted desert dye
the color of the Arizona plains
and at certain times, the West Virginia sky.
Pride and purity may use the color white.
But snow-topped Colorado mountains,
ice across the Great Lakes in December
and Alaska every day of winter time
claimed the color first.
Not to mention that long strand of sandy Utah
and every Massachusetts / California beach.
So many uniform are blue
that we forgot the Truckee and the Mississippi
blue sky ocean to ocean,
blue ocean sky to sky.
Atlantic and Pacific have always been not green
but blue.
I know my history lesson,
I learned it well
that this nation to become a nation
ran forward into battle shouting freedom!
And often bore the tattered tri-color
home again
for men to mend
and start another battle new.
I am aware
that flagmakers make new fortunes
every Veterans / Decoration Day,
and broken bodies bathed in canvas
and the stars and stripes
have slid off ten thousand ships
maybe twenty thousand more,
to rest upon the bottom of the mother sea.
Excelsior at Iwo Jima.
Bully at Bull Run.
A step for man and mankind
murmured on the moon
Peace with honor... somewhere.
Mothers of dead sons have pride. Me too.
But I would rather paint my colors
on a bright balloon -
children then would wave at me
and chase my shadow.
Old men who sit at tables making wars
don’t do so in my name again.
It has taken me two hundred years
to come down to this place.
I have earned the right to see red, white, and blue
not on a battered standard borne in battle
but on my brother’s face.
I love my flag.
To me it stands for love
kindness even to my enemy
and most of all, for brotherhood.
It’s doubtful that your family
doesn’t contain the memory of one dead soldier, father, brother, friend.
Whether it does or doesn’t, a nice project for today might be to take a
small bouquet of flowers to your local veteran’s cemetery and place it on
an undecorated grave.
RM 5/30/99 Some material
previously unpublished.
 "Live at
the Lensic" benefit appearance in Santa Fe just announced. Booking for "An Evening with
Rod McKuen" at the Riverton Rendezvous is open! Click below for
more details:
Concert & Appearance Details
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