Welcome back to the odd and whimsical poetery of the Peeps related to holidaze! Let’s investigate what today is, because we need all the holidaze we can celebrate, right?
Lately, every day seems to be many holidays! Which is good, because we all have our favorites. So I will pick out one, and you can click the link above if you’re curious about the rest. This is an Open Thread, so please feel free to add your favorite pomes and photoes and holidaze for today in the Comments!
Today is National Park Service Founders Day
On August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the "Organic Act" which stated that the purpose of the newly formed National Park Service was "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and wild life therein, and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."
[Italics mine.] I thought we should take a moment to revisit the actual purpose of the national parks. Just sayin.
America (Assateague)
by Kathleen Graber
…. Today, everyone has come to see the horses, who have been here
for four hundred years. In myth, they descend from of a herd
brought on a Spanish galleon & swim ashore to their astonishing
freedom after the ship hits a sandbar in a storm & goes down.
-snip-
In the woods, where we cannot see them, the small spotted elk
from Taiwan—renamed deer, though their DNA would reveal
that that is not what they are—are settling down to sleep. The sky
& marsh purple & flood with the perfectly familiar: the bat,
the house mouse, the raccoon, the Norway rat, the least shrew,
the meadow jumping mouse, the possum, the fox, the vole….
[Please see the poem link for the rest of this and for other National Parks poems — there are 50, one for each state!]
[Kathleen Graber received a BA from Hofstra University and an MFA from New York University. She is the author of Correspondence (Saturnalia Books, 2006) and The Eternal City: Poems (Princeton University Press, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Graber is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Princeton University, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, among others. She teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University.]