St Edwards University - Tower Yearbook (Austin, TX)

Page 207 text:

Peridots and periwinkle blue medallions Gilded galleons spilled across the ocean floor Treasure somewhere in the sea and he will find where Never mind their questions there’s no answer for The roll of the harbor wake The songs that the rigging makes The taste of the spray he takes And he learns to give He aches and he learns to live He stakes all his silver On a promise to be free Mermaids live in colonies All his seadreams come to me The Dawntreader by Joni Mitchell City satins left at home I will not need them I believe him when he tells of loving me. Something truthful in the sea your lies will find you Leave behind your streets he said and come to me Come down from the neon nights Come down from the tourist sights Run down till the rain delights you You do not hide Sunlight will renew your pride Skin white by skin golden Like a promise to be free Dolphins playing in the sea All his seadreams come to me Seabird I have seen you fly above the pilings I am smiling at your circles in the air I will come and sit by you while he lies sleeping Fold your fleet wings I have brought some dreams to share A dream that you love someone A dream that the wars are done A dream that you tell no one but the grey sea They'll say that you re crazy And a dream of a baby Like a promise to be free Children laughing out to sea All his seadreams come to me

Page 209 text:

I n the new play Twigs, the female lead is preparing a Thanksgiving dinner for a load of visiting relatives, and sighs, “This holiday is an awful lot of work—no wonder no other country celebrates it!” This line gets a hearty laugh from the audience, because Thanksgiving is a lot of work for the house- wife—but | also happen to think that it is the “purest” holiday of the year. What I mean by that odd adjective is that all other holidays are perverted by personal greed or national pride or ethnic vanity or commercial consid- erations; and Christmas most of all has notoriously turned from a meaningful religious observance to a frenzied exchange of nondurable goods. Thanksgiving alone has retained its original character. Except for a few turkey growers and cranberry dispensers, nobody is desperately trying to capitalize on this holiday; even the politicians have not been able successfully to exploit its theme, as they have everything else from Labor Day to the Fourth of July. It is a pity no other country celebrates it, for it is the one universal holiday, larger in concept than any one country, larger in loyalty than any one religion; for it praises the process of creation and the munificence of nature in giving so freely what we take for granted all the rest of the year. This is a bountiful world we live in, and we take more from it than we give to it. We take not only from creation itself, but from generations of the past, the fruits of whose labor we enjoy with almost no awareness of the pains and perils attending it. Such unawareness—such unconscious ingratitude— inculcates in people a dangerous pride, a hardness of heart, a false sense of self-sufficiency. Thanksgiving, in its own modest way, tries to remind us of how much we owe to forces outside ourselves; and how much all of us, regardless of sta- tion, are in the hands of Providence. Its singular glory is that it is, at once, the most universal, the most religious, and the most democratic of holidays. Sydney Harris Dist. by Publishers-Hall Syndicate