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Dads

“He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it. Dad never was a money-maker, and, as nearly as I can make out, he never wanted to be. He worked mighty hard when he worked, but his real job was living.”

—Clarence Budington Kelland, 1927

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“My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, ‘You’re tearing up the grass.’ ‘We’re not raising grass,’ Dad would reply. ‘We’re raising boys.’”

—Harmon Killebrew, 1984

The Wharf of Dreams

Strange wares are handled on the wharves of sleep:
Shadows of shadows pass, and many a light
     Flashes a signal fire across the night;
Barges depart whose voiceless steersmen keep
     Their way without a star upon the deep;
And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews,
     Come cries of incommunicable news,
While cargoes pile the piers, a moon-white heap—

Budgets of dream-dust, merchandise of song,
Wreckage of hope and packs of ancient wrong,
Nepenthes gathered from a secret strand,
     Fardels of heartache, burdens of old sins,
     Luggage sent down from dim ancestral inns,
And bales of fantasy from No-Man’s Land.

—Edwin Markham, “The Wharf of Dreams,” The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems, 1899

My World

If I had a big balloon
Round as any Harvest Moon
And a bully kicked it, say,
With his foot, and ran away.
All the world would comfort me,
Saying softly, “What a shame!”

Well, it wasn’t stamped or kicked,
My balloon was only pricked
With a very little pin
Touched to it, not driven in.
No one came to comfort me
Though ’twas broken, just the same.

—Janet Barton, age 17, St. Timothy’s School, Catonsville, Maryland, “My World,” 1920s

Bottled

trapped in a bottle
thrown out to sea

trapped in a bottle
my wishes are three

trapped in a bottle
that’s drunken me

trapped in a bottle
emotions stormy

trapped in a bottle
flashing brightly

trapped in a bottle
this vessel empty

Terri Guillemets