Hold Fast to Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

(photo Public Playground on the Charles River, near Soldiers Field Road 06/1973, http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/3952795663/)

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

The Martin Luther King Jr. Center Archive opens Monday, January 16, 2012. It includes digital access to Dr. King's sermons, speeches, and letters, as well as images related to the Civil Rights Movement. On Monday, the United States commemorates the life and work of the civil rights leader. His well-known "I Have a Dream" speech still inspires us. (Read or hear it here.)

(photo http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-1054179588) Martin Luther King, Jr., delivers his "I Have a Dream" speech, 1963.

Langston Hughes, Harlem Renaissance poet, says to "Hold fast to dreams," for without dreams our lives are dull and purposeless.(photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/blacksnob/2938947823/sizes/m/in/photostream/)
His poem "Harlem [Dream Deferred"] implies dire consequences when a dream fails to come to fruition.



Kathy Mattea offers another look at dreams and dreamers who try to make the world a better place. In "Beautiful Fool," she sings, "Dreams weren't meant to come true, That's why they call 'em dreams."


What do you think? Are dreams--and striving for them--worth it? What are your dreams? What are you doing to make them come true?

Sensational Census--National Poetry Month

(photo by eiratansey www.flickr.com/photos/eiratansey/4405866236/)

In addition to Poetry Month and Jazz Appreciation Month, it's Census Month! You have no doubt completed and returned your form. Thoughts and feelings about the census vary widely, as the poems below show.

The census can answer questions such as "What areas have gained population?" Here's a Robert Frost poem about the opposite situation:

The Census-Taker

I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening
To a slab-built, black-paper-covered house
Of one room and one window and one door,
The only dwelling in a waste cut over
A hundred square miles round it in the mountains:
(continue reading here).

(photo by Jason Pratt http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_Creek_State_Park_Shack.jpg)

Some folks are not happy to see a census taker at the door. Hear what Madam has to say to the census taker in Langston Hughes' poem. (Scroll and click "play" next to the + sign.)

When the census results are released, we will know how many people live where, how many live in their own homes, how many live in each home, and other statistics. All these numbers remind me of one of W.H. Auden's poems:

The Unknown Citizen

"He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint(continue reading here)

What do you think of the census? Regardless of your opinion, you count!