Welcome 2016 ![]()
"Be at War with your Vices, at Peace with your Neighbours, and let every New-Year find you a better Man"~Quoted in Benjamin Franklin's 1755 Poor Richard's Almanac
What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That's not been said a thousand times?
The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.
We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.
We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.
We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our prides, we sheet our dead.
We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that's the burden of a year.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Above:"
Desiderata" (Latin: "desired things") is a
1927 prose poem by American writer
Max Ehrmann. Largely unknown in the author's lifetime, the text became widely famous after its use in devotional and spoken-word recordings in 1971 and 1972. Below is an early-1970s film version (there were not videos back then) that was widely seen and played in many high schools to help motivate kids. Actor
Morgan Freeman, interviewed on
Oprah Winfrey's Master Class television special (2012), expressed how deeply the poem 'Desiderata' had shaped his life. In the turbulent 1970s the poem was especially appreciated by the emerging openly gay population as a sort of 'life owner's manual' to not let negativity and hostility discourage a gay man's progress in demanding equality and self worth.
