Lord, give me this day
my opinion and forgive
the one yesterday

Adapted from the line:

For my part,” an editorial writer ended his silence, “I begin each bright morning with praying: Lord, give me this day my daily opinion and forgive me the one I had yesterday.”

As it appeared in the poem, “The People, Yes!” by Carl Sandburg.

According to Wikipedia, The People, Yes is a book-length poem written by Carl Sandburg and published in 1936. The 300 page work is thoroughly interspersed with references to American culture, phrases, and stories (such as the legend of Paul Bunyan). Published at the height of the Great Depression, the work lauds the perseverance of the American people in notably plain-spoken language. It was written over an eight-year period. It is Sandburg’s last major book of poetry.

As it says, The People, Yes, lauds the perseverance of the American people in notably plain-spoken language.

It is also one of the great collections of one-liners in my personal experience until Garrison Keillor published his Pretty Good Joke book.

Mr. Sandburg includes:

“Man,” spoke up an anthropologist, “is a two-legged animal with¬ out feathers, the only one who cooks his food, uses an alpha¬ bet, carries firearms, drinks when he is not thirsty, and practices love with an eye on birth control.”

“Shakespeare is the greatest writer of them all, a dead Englishman and you have to read him in high school or you don’t pass.

“I want money,” said the editorial writer who knew where he got it, “in order to buy the time to get the things that money will not buy.”

I close with this blessing.

May you live to eat the hen that scratches over your grave.

Belle Riviere –
the french named it – a woman
easy to look at

We crossed the Ohio River again recently.

I was reminded of the poem, Whiffs of the Ohio River at Cincinnati, by Carl Sandburg from the collection, Good Morning, America.

The part in particular that goes:

When I asked for fish in the restaurant facing the Ohio river, with fish signs and fish pictures all over the wooden, crooked frame of the fish shack, the young man said, ‘Come around next Friday — the fish is all gone today’

So, I took eggs, fried, straight up, one side, and he murmured, humming, looking out at the shining breast of the Ohio river, ‘And the next IS something else, and the next is something else’

The customer next was a hoarse roustabout, handling nail kegs on a steamboat all day, asking for three eggs, sunny side up, three, nothing less, shake us a mean pan of eggs

And while we sat eating eggs, looking at the shining breast of the Ohio river in the evening lights, he had his thoughts and I had mine thinking how the French who found the Ohio river named it La Belle Riviere meaning a woman easy to look at.