I Forgot to Remember – A Poem

I FORGOT TO REMEMBER

A spring day in May on Primrose Hill

2015 jdj

The chestnut tree so bleak and weary through the winter

Is suddenly transformed overnight

Awash with shimmering green leaves and piles

Of bright white whipped cream cones of flowers tipped with

So many bright red cherry flowers,

looking like an ice cream sundae,

Dance on your boughs in stunning beauty and grace

Like hundreds of white angels singing peacefully

Miss Hawthorn so cold and cruel and sharp in winter’s light

Softens and smiles with new growth that hides her bite

Under millions of shocking pink buds that give shelter

To the robin building her nest deep inside her heart

I forgot to remember the chestnut’s poetry, the

Hawthorns beauty

Beneath the sudden canopy of the sycamore are

The dancing dolls of Queen Annes lace

They come up to our waist and gently touch us

With flowers intertwined in a weave of magic,

a sea of white floats around us

and we are moving in clouds

And undernearth my feet I stop and kneel to

See the tiny wild violet’s sweet flower reach up

From the green to greet the summer with

An innocence of being that is pure and beautiful

Winking at us to stop and enjoy her small elegance

I forgot to remember the clouds of Queen Annes lace

And the purity of the violet

Too soon you give way to nature’s progress and

Leave us with a memory that winter works so hard

To erase

But I will forget to forget and remember,

I will remember not to forget to remember,

Every burst of spring on the hill

WE HAD A CHANCE TO ABOLISH SLAVERY IN 1776 – THE ORIGINAL DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE BY THOMAS JEFFERSON.

In the aftermath of the horrendous terrorist attack in South Carolina at the AME Church  I  went back into my research on a film project I did about Thomas Paine and the American Revolution.  I wanted to find the ORIGINAL draft of Thomas Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence.”  Paine had helped in the drafting of Jefferson’s plea to end the practice of slavery in the Declaration.  This was in the late spring of 1776.  The Continental Congress went into a tailspin over the abolition of slavery  text in the draft.  Here is what Thomas Jefferson wanted for America.  This would have ended slavery then..in 1776 instead of allowing the barbaric act of slavery to continue in the land of the FREE?   Please read it and share.  I also included his original opening, which included the word Independent.  Yes, Jefferson owned slaves and we know about his affair, but it does not change what he wrote or what he envisioned for America.

“We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness;
(HERE JEFFERSON IS STATING WHY THE REVOLUTIONARIES ARE BREAKING WITH KING GEORGE OF GREAT BRITAIN.  THIS WAS TAKEN OUT BY PRESSURE FROM GEORGIA AND SOUTH CAROLINA, WHO SAID THEY WOULD SIDE WITH THE BRITISH IF THE SLAVERY TEXT WAS NOT REMOVED.   WE KNOW WHAT HAPPENED.)
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
in every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered by repeated injury. a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free. future ages will scarce believe that the hardiness of one man, adventured within the short compass of 12 years only, on so many acts of tyranny without a mask, over a people fostered & fixed in principles of liberty.”