Good Morning Thinkers!

Dream that is Dying

Last night, President Bush quoted President Roosevelt, apparently not realizing that he was quoting from "Ode," one of my favorite poems by Arthur O'Shaughnessy.  Some time ago we ran the 3-stanza poem and someone discovered that there are another 20 or so stanzas.  After reading the whole thing, I know why the 3-stanzas are what has come to be known as the full poem ... it is magnificiently complete and we think it deserves another run -- it's the last two lines that were quoted last night.

Ode

by Arthur O’Shaughnessy

We are the music-makers,

   and we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

   and sitting by desolate streams;

World-losers and world forsakers,

   on whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers & shakers

   of the world forever it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties

  We build up the world’s great cities,

And out of a fabulous story,

   We fashion an empire’s glory.

One man with a dream at pleasure,

   Shall go forth and conquer a crown,

And three with a new song’s measure

   Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying

   in the buried past of the earth,

Built Nineveh with our sighing,      

  and Babel itself with our mirth;

And o’erthrew them with prophesying

  to the old of the new world’s worth;

For each age is a dream that is dying

  or one that is coming to birth.

Thank You, Martin!

Numbers

by Joyce Wycoff

Twenty-six he was when destiny crooked its finger,
beckoning the still-green minister-scholar into the world.
Forty-two she was when she pounded on the door
Theoretically opened ninety-four years before.

It was the first of December, 1955, when history wove
Their fates together into a multi-colored tapestry of change.
“Tired,” she said, “Bone tired. Tired of giving up.
Tired of giving in,” she said and sat in the front of the bus.

Montgomery, Alabama, shivered as the temperature rose.
The old ways could be heard keening long into the night
As 42,000 people left the buses to stand by Rosa’s side.
381 days they walked: nannies, maids, carpenters, all.

Two hundred years of anger rose up to shatter the silence
And from this deafening roar came a molasses-rich voice
Spinning a song of hope with a melody of peace and love.
“I have a dream,” boomed and echoed across the land.

The young minister-leader painted a picture of a life
without color lines, a world without violence.
His voice lifted the dream: Richmond, Little Rock,
Dallas opened their buses, took down their signs.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent
about things that matter," he said, never silent again.
He took our hands and led us step-by-step onto a new path,
Brothers and sisters connected by heart rather than skin.

“Always avoid violence,” he said.
“If you succumb to the temptation …
unborn generations will be the recipients
of a long and desolate night of bitterness,
and your chief legacy to the future will be an
endless reign of meaningless chaos."

Thirty nine he was when one man with a gun silenced
The voice, but not the words …
Those four words branded into our brains:
“I have a dream …,” saffron-rich messengers left behind
To carry forward the dream of a color-blind world
Of hope and peace.

Dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr. born January 15, 1929;
Assassinated April 4, 1968.