Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dreamed some rain so I could sleep.
Dreamed the wind left-handed
so I could part its mane and enter
the dance that carries the living, the dead, and the unborn
in one momentum through the trillion gate.
Dreamed a man and woman
in different attitudes of meeting and parting
so I could tell the time,
the periods of the sun,
and which face my heart showed,
and which is displayed to a hidden fold.
Dreamed the world an open book of traces
anyone could read who knew the language of traces.
Dreamed the world is a book. And any page
you pause at finds you
where you breathe now,
and you can read the open
secret of who you are. As you read,
and other pages go on turning, falling
through the page before you, the sound of them the waves
of the waters you walk beside
in your other dreams of the world
as story, world as song, world
you dreamed you were not dreaming.
Dreamed my father reading out loud to me,
my mother sewing beside me, singing
a counting song,
so I wouldn't be afraid to turn
from known lights toward the ancestor of light.
~ Li-Young Lee ~
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
-Abraham Lincoln, 16th US president (1809-1865)
Love Poem with Toast
Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.
The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.
With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,
as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.
Miller Williams
Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.
-Amschel Mayer Rothschild, banker (1743-1812)
The price we pay for money is paid in liberty.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist, and poet (1850-1894)
We're still in Babylon but
We do not weep
Why should we weep?
We have forgotten
How to weep
We've sold our harps
And bought ourselves machines
That do our singing for us
And who remembers now
The songs we sang in Zion?
We have got used to exile
We hardly notice
Our captivity
For some of us
There are such comforts here
Such luxuries
Even a guard
To keep the beggars
From annoying us
Jerusalem
We have forgotten you.
Anne Porter
We're still in Babylon but
We do not weep
Why should we weep?
We have forgotten
How to weep
We've sold our harps
And bought ourselves machines
That do our singing for us
And who remembers now
The songs we sang in Zion?
We have got used to exile
We hardly notice
Our captivity
For some of us
There are such comforts here
Such luxuries
Even a guard
To keep the beggars
From annoying us
Jerusalem
We have forgotten you.
Anne Porter
No one can earn a million dollars honestly.
William Jennings Bryan
In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside sowing clover.
Wendell Berry
