The 18th Century has terrible wifi

I meant to blog every day, but since the connection required me to sit outside in the heat with the mosquitos, I abandoned that plan.

I am on my way home tonight. What a wonderful week!  But I am happy to be going home.

I found the poem I wrote at the end of my week here in 2008. I wrote a different reflection this year, but it is not quite ready for public viewing.

I started this poem standing at Surrender Field in Yorktown.  I revised it on the flight home.

What message?

Reaching out across the years, black ink on paper speaks to us

Of rights and responsibilities, traditions and laws.

Across the Atlantic to land flanked by English rights and native peoples

Starving, building, growing, killing, making a life here.

British citizens, mercantilism rules your world.

What have we learned?

 

Brought back from ruin, from the lazy and the crazy, to teach and learn from the past, the bricks and boards, pottery shards and tobacco notes, they speak to us.

The 18^th century brought to life, in a sleepy Virginia town. 

Do we disturb the ghosts?

From mother England you break away, declaring Virginia’s rights, human rights.

All people are created equal.

That is our great history, that word people – who are the people?

United States citizens, you have changed the world, will any republic so conceived and so dedicated long endure?

What could we learn?

 

What is our great task today? 

What standard do we unfurl into the future, so that it will be said that what started in Jamestown and Williamsburg and triumphed at Yorktown and Philadelphia grew in our day too?

Who are the people?

World citizens, what should we learn?

 

 

Heather Pang

Summer 2008