June 16ths

6/16/1886

It's been two months since Haymarket yet I react to unexpected sounds—a dropped crate, a slamming door, the clatter of hooves.

Possible lines for poem:

A kingdom of blood and profit
The smell of money mingles with slaughter
I wonder what scars it will leave on the children
Playing in Haymarket square

Mrs. Kowalski still grieving her son. He died not from bombs but from the police charge that followed.

[Source]  These generations are often inaccurate but I'm using them to weave a fictional narrative based on some of the provable facts, mostly those following the Haymarket riot, from the perspective of a fictional character, Tom Sullivan.

6/16/1998

It always looks like it’s going to rain, but it never does.     

6/16/2003

“What makes it art is that the artist went further than others had gone before.”  [Attribution unknown] 

6/16/2011

Thoughts on Alim Qasimov Ensemble: Music arises from devotional stories, not musicianship; call and response; bent seconds and other unique ornaments; notes that pull down; Non-western—music floats over drone but not the tonic. 

6/16/2024 

This letter perfectly works as poetry, and perhaps a lyric, perhaps perfectly for Father's Day.

6/16/1895, Springfield Centre, N.Y. (Letters of William James)

To Mrs. Henry Whitman: "Just reviving from the addled and corrupted condition in which the Cambridge year has left me; just at the portals of that Adirondack wilderness for the breath of which I have sighed for years, unable to escape the cares of domesticity and get there; just about to get a little health into me, a little simplification and solidification and purification and sanification—things which will never come again if this one chance be lost; just filled to satiety with all the simpering conventions and vacuous excitements of so-called civilization; hungering for their opposite, the smell of the spruce, the feel of the moss, the sound of the cataract, the bath in its waters, the divine outlook from the cliff or hill-top over the unbroken forest..."

Adirondack wilderness
The breath of which I have sighed for years
Unable to escape the cares
Just about to get a little health into me
Things which will never come again if this one chance be lost
Filled to satiety with all the simpering conventions of so-called civilization
Hungering for their opposite
The smell of the spruce,
The feel of the moss,
The sound of the cataract,
The bath in its waters,
The divine outlook from the cliff,
The hill-top over the unbroken forest

Adirondack Wilderness (6-16-1895) by meta4s

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As arranged as a shortet: