Tomorrow is the day celebrated as the anniversary of John the Baptist's beheading. Also the day Atahuallpa (last ruler of the Incas) was executed by the Conquistadors.

But today is the 40th anniversary of the original March on Washington, and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, which should be heard in its entirety. I was 11 years old at the time, not really aware of what was going on outside of Hopkins, MN (until JFK was assassinated a few months later).

Tomorrow I'll be flying out to Minneapolis for a few days (on NW flight 1963, as a matter of fact).

The trouble with language poetry is, that by denying narrative coherence, it denies the "story" part of history, the drama. The historian Taylor Branch put it pretty well on the Peter Jennings show tonight: "People don't realize that the King speech at the Lincoln Memorial was a founding father's speech; to this day Americans don't realize that their founding fathers are black" (quoting as close as I can from memory).

Anyway, Happy Trails (until next week), & O Happy Day.