bicentennial

While the nation's added 40 years, I remember 1976 and the patriotic fire hydrants all around Park Ridge, and painting my BMX to match. 200 is an interesting number, more than a little, still less than 2 thirds a year. Part of Jon's project 'Every Thought Is A Prayer' is to span those days of full year, and I've tried to do my bit with a weekly (sometimes very weakly;), this week exceptional due to the Nobel Prize for literature, which compelled its own response.

We hope Stillwater Symposia can have a new challenge for 2017, by the way, with more contributors. Visuals, for instance, can feature in our photos, sketches, Google image grabs--as I've included at the bottom of this 200th Lost Menagerie poem:

               A Marathon Stone

Hidden in here is a marathon stone,

not ‘Dare’, the pebble that loiters in my shoe

(a friend I couldn’t pace with on my own),

instead, a road-trip made in mind with you.

A colleague defined philology once

as ‘syllable to story’—language play,

measures of life decreed by some dunce

with chisel and slate and time in his day.

Tending, being tended by animal lure,

a jungle of needs in fields to explore,

primates de facto and sphinxes de jure,

we riddle along and wrangle for more.

Now on the look-out of fifty years spanned,

I still want to try courses known and new,

the nexus of woods and villages planned,

the random exponents felt or thought through.

Runestones remind us of words that have been

cherished or left for the moss to enshroud;

turn then a page across oceans again,

and run with the λόγος God has allowed.