"A Few Words about Builders and Legacies," A Poetry Post

It is hard to remember the man who first perceived the need for a road.

By the time his concept has been born into this world,

it has been dug and smoothed and

paved and planted and

wound and marked,

and it is hard to remember the relevance of the

man who first dreamed it.

It is equally as difficult to appreciate

the man who put the first

hole in the ground

for the first beam of the

Golden Gate Bridge.

I can imagine the perils he must have braved,

since in his time he

believed the grandiose ideas of some

visionary

who’d convinced him that if he

dug that hole,

eventually,

a beautiful thing would come out of it.

At the time,

I’m sure he was dirty and wet and

frustrated with being called a lunatic

for believing any man,

visionary or not,

could produce such a thing

in his lifetime.

Perhaps he needed the money,

like the many road workers and

bridge builders who

come into the process

uncertain of the investment of

sweat, tears and life required to

realize such a thing as a road

or a bridge when there is

no evidence of either.

None of that matters once you’re in!

Once you get a whiff of the aroma of that vision,

the effects are so consuming, enrapturing, endearing,

that a digger becomes a producer.

The same is true of the

man who surveyed the ground

on which the Twin Towers stood.

When we remember that they fell,

it is hard to also memorialize the fact that

they had been dreamed and built by

people who suffered ridicule that

far outweighed the

praise and glory granted to the

value of the buildings as they

existed in the minds of others.

It was the ingenuity that made them beautiful,

but all we can recall

is their function in the perpetuation of the world market,

their causal link to a war that we have yet to win

against an adversary that we have yet to soundly identify.

It is better to find inspiration in the men who laid the foundation,

not the men who mocked their development.

We have lost sight of the builders of our generations.

Those who paved for us inroads to existences we

never could have imagined;

those who planted the first beams of our brilliance;

who suffered the initial ridicules of standing behind

nobodies like us…

We were people who had done nothing remarkable.

We were people who had no great bearing on the

direction of our worlds.

We were people who started directionless.

It took the visionaries, the diggers,

the smoothers, the pavers,

the planters, the markers,

the surveyors, the thoughts,

the prayers, the promptings,

the afflictions and sometimes even the deaths of our

builders to fashion us into something useful.

It is important then that we not get too caught up in the

beauty of our end result.

Rather,

we must vigorously pursue a full understanding of the

dirt in our past,

and how that dirt relates to the

porcelain and polish of now.

Only then can we reproduce greatness.

There must be some recognition,

some circumscription,

some re-visitation

of the builders’ legacies.