Joy and Kenne Celebrating Her Birthday July 24, 2011
Hugging-Words — Source PVE
As we grow old, remember to stay young.
As we grow wiser, remember to stay foolish.
As we grow weak, remember to stay strong.
As we grow dull, remember to stay sexy.
As we grow stupid, remember to stay sensible.
As we grow suspicious, remember to stay trusting.
As we grow forgetful, remember to stay attentive.
As we grow gloomy, remember to stay cheerful.
As we grow conventional, remember to stay enlightened.
As we grow frail, remember to stay sturdy.
As we grow, may we stay forever
young, foolish,
strong,
sexy,
sensible,
trusting,
attentive,
cheerful,
enlightened, and
sturdy — simple words to live by.
Words are powerful!
Why?
Because they can hurt and
they can bring people together.
Both acts have powerful results.
Words divide us.
However,
the power of words
is that once divided,
they can be used
to bring us back together.
We should not allow words
to change our relationships,
because unlike the cucumber
that becomes a pickle
and can never be a cucumber again,
we can break down the walls that divide.
Ed Folsom presenting “Counting from One to a Million, Whitman and the Civil War Dead” — Image by kenne
For the 24th year the Writers in Performance series at Lone Star College – Montgomery celebrated the birthday of Walt Whitman. For the last several years the celebrations has been in two parts, one a lecture on campus in the afternoon, the second part an evening gathering of poets at a local pub or cafe.
This year’s lecture featured Dr. Ed Folsom recognizing the sesquicentennial of the publication of Dram Taps, most of which Whitman wrote while serving as a hospital volunteer tending wounded and dying soldiers. Whitman felt that a poet’s voice was needed to document the war and help make sense of such a travesty.
This year’s Birthday Celebration for Walt Whitman took place May 7th, which I thought would be appropriate to delay posting till this Memorial Day, 2015. (Post Note) — The holiday originally was called Decoration Day and was a day of remembrance for Union soldiers who died in the American Civil War.
kenne
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The Gathering of Poets at Dosey Doe Music Cafe, Conroe Texas — Images by kenne
The following passage from Dram Taps includes the longest sentence ever written by Whitman.
The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up — The Unknown (from Memoranda During the War)
THE DEAD in this war—there they lie, strewing the fields and woods and valleys and battle-fields of the south—Virginia, the Peninsula—Malvern hill and Fair Oaks—the banks of the Chickahominy—the terraces of Fredericksburgh—Antietam bridge—the grisly ravines of Manassas—the bloody promenade of the Wilderness—the varieties of the strayed dead, (the estimate of the War department is 25,000 national soldiers kill’d in battle and never buried at all, 5,000 drown’d—15,000 inhumed by strangers, or on the march in haste, in hitherto unfound localities—2,000 graves cover’d by sand and mud by Mississippi freshets, 3,000 carried away by caving-in of banks, &c.,)—Gettysburgh, the West, Southwest—Vicksburgh—Chattanooga—the trenches of Petersburgh—the numberless battles, camps, hospitals everywhere—the crop reap’d by the mighty reapers, typhoid, dysentery, inflammations—and blackest and loathesomest of all, the dead and living burial-pits, the prison-pens of Andersonville, Salisbury, Belle-Isle, &c., (not Dante’s pictured hell and all its woes, its degradations, filthy torments, excell’d those prisons)—the dead, the dead, the dead—our dead—or South or North, ours all, (all, all, all, finally dear to me)—or East or West—Atlantic coast or Mississippi valley—somewhere they crawl’d to die, alone, in bushes, low gullies, or on the sides of hills—(there, in secluded spots, their skeletons, bleach’d bones, tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing, are occasionally found yet)—our young men once so handsome and so joyous, taken from us—the son from the mother, the husband from the wife, the dear friend from the dear friend—the clusters of camp graves, in Georgia, the Carolinas, and in Tennessee—the single graves left in the woods or by the road-side, (hundreds, thousands, obliterated)—the corpses floated down the rivers, and caught and lodged, (dozens, scores, floated down the upper Potomac, after the cavalry engagements, the pursuit of Lee, following Gettysburgh)—some lie at the bottom of the sea—the general million, and the special cemeteries in almost all the States—the infinite dead—(the land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw)—not only Northern dead leavening Southern soil—thousands, aye tens of thousands, of Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth.
And everywhere among these countless graves—everywhere in the many soldier Cemeteries of the Nation, (there are now, I believe, over seventy of them)—as at the time in the vast trenches, the depositories of slain, Northern and Southern, after the great battles—not only where the scathing trail passed those years, but radiating since in all the peaceful quarters of the land—we see, and ages yet may see, on monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of thousands, the significant word
UNKNOWN.
(In some of the cemeteries nearly all the dead are unknown. At Salisbury, N. C., for instance, the known are only 85, while the unknown are 12,027, and 11,700 of these are buried in trenches. A national monument has been put up here, by order of Congress, to mark the spot—but what visible, material monument can ever fittingly commemorate that spot?)
Looking back on our move from The Woodlands, Texas to Tucson, I’m not sure which one of us may have experienced the most anxiety. One might think it would have been the cat, Kika (who passed away this past December), but Joy would probably argue that point. In many ways we have adjusted well to our new home, town and friends.
Now we are starting our fifth year here, longer than most friends and family would have predicted, especially since Joy has not grown to love southern Arizona as I have — we may very well be considering a different five-year plan after this year.
The four years we have lived here have allowed us to experience most of the things we took into consideration in making the decision to make the move: a new adventure, closer to Joy’s mother and siblings. We are now moving into our fifth year in the Catalina Foothills, not yet knowing what will be driving our next five-year plan, which is why I share again the following poem, “Birthday.” The poem could have very easily been titled, “Life.”
Joy and Kenne Celebrating Her Birthday July 24, 2011
Image by kenne
Hiking The Sunset Trail Out Of Marshall Gulch On Mt. Lemmon — Images by kenne
Kenne, Kika & Joy On Empty Patio (June 21, 2010)
