MADE IN AMERICA: AMERICAN CRAYONS

 

Crumbling black brick

with white lettering

Index finger smokestack

Dismantled machines

Lost workers

Instruments of color creation

Kindergarten perceptions

of broccoli stalk trees and beaming suns

an artist's rendering gauzy scenes

of a Provence countryside

cylinders of orange, mauve and maroon

poured, molded, dried

cut, packaged shipped

opened in rooms of A, B, C, 1, 2, 3

abandoned on a June afternoon

a worn palette of nubs

rolling around

in a busted box

FIFTEEN MINUTES

Napoleon said that he could always recover lost space but never lost time.  At the battle of Gettysburg, 215 of 262 members of the Minnesota First Volunteers became casualties charging against a Confederate force that was six times its size.  Union General Hancock ordered them to charge all because he needed 15 more minutes to reinforce an open gap in the Federal lines. Vince Lombardi never conceded defeat, only admitting “we ran of time.”  Steven Jobs declared the most precious resource human beings have is time.  This morning, I hit the snooze button for a handful of minutes that I’ll never remember. 

A SHORT HISTORY OF WRITING

Humans invented words to help remember and communicate. 

Socrates was a curmudgeon about it all and thought transforming words into writing would make our memories lazy.  More words got invented expanding our vocabularies.  Great ideas were turned into words that stood the test of time– The Ten Commandments, War and Peace, grandmother’s recipe for fudge.  Along the way, we fell in love with words and wrote poems.  We selected words for sound and meaning.  In modern times, daily newspapers shorted the lifespan of the written word to 24 hours.  More recently, social media shortened a word’s duration to only a few minutes.  Words buried other words under a nonstop and accelerating stream of updates that are themselves quickly forgotten. 

What’s next for words?  Will they move fast enough for us?  Carry enough meaning?  Will the written word die off and we go back to using pictures like our ancient ancestors drawing on cave walls?