Grass

"A house divided against itself cannot stand" ~ Abraham Lincoln

In case you haven't heard, you will. This year will mark Abe Lincoln's 200th birthday, or bicentennial. b. February 12, 1809.

The more one reads about our sixteenth president, the more one understands why he has been revered as one of the great ones. In part, the opportunity to display one's greatness emerges through moments of crisis. One of my favorite Lincoln quotes actually deals with that very thing: "Prepare oneself and the opportunity will come." Lincoln rose to the occasion because he had spent years in personal development.

One of the more significant speeches he ever gave was ruthlessly criticized by most of the media when he gave it. It was "too short." Only the Chicago Tribune noted its incredible power and depth. The other speaker that day blustered on for two hours. The Trib predicted that in a hundred years Lincoln's great speech would still be read. Turns out they got it right.

The address was delivered in a ceremony at Gettysburg on the heels of one of the Civil War's bloodiest encounters. It is a distillation of thought which exemplifies the writerly dictum, "Less is more."

The Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The Gettysburg battlefield is more than just a place. It is a symbol of something bigger. Carl Sandburg, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Lincoln, incorporates some of this into a poem called Grass, which has echoes in the song Where Have All the Flowers Gone and other anti-war songs popularized by Joan Baez and her contemporaries.

Grass
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work -
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.