For my 87th birthday, my son Peter wrote a superb rendition
of the Emancipation Proclamation celebrating the many poems I have written over
the years to mark family events. Then he enlisted all our kids and grandkids
from all over the country to contribute to the video version of this wonderful
tribute.
What a celebration!
You can view the entire tribe - plus Ellie - here:
And here is the text
of my personalized version of the Emancipation Proclamation:
Four score and seven years ago Charlotte and Del brought
forth, upon the frozen tundra of the north central midwest, a new boy,
conceived in Minneapolis, and dedicated to the proposition that "all poems
are not created equal."
Now we are celebrating the birthday of Larry Gruman, a great
minor poet, testing whether his poetry, or any poetry so conceived, and so
dedicated, can long endure. We are well read on the subject of the YMCA,
Valentine’s Day, swimming lessons and sweaters, trampolines, trains and the
Ducks.
We have in fact come to dedicate portions of our homes as
the final resting place for those poems, that this light verse may live.
This we may, in all propriety do. But, in a larger sense, we
can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow, this poetry ourselves
alone — The brave little cinquains, sonnets, blank verse, yes, even the
doggerel which struggled to make a rhyme, have hallowed it, far above our poor
power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say
about these poems; while it can never forget the man who gave them life.
It is rather for us, the children and grandchildren of
Larry, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that, from
these dozens, nay hundreds, of honorable heptameters, stanzas, even the
occasional falling meter (but never the onomotopoeia), we take increased
devotion to that cause for which they were created in the fullest measure of devotion—that
we here highly resolve these poems shall not have been composed in vain; that
this verse shall have a new birth of freedom, and that poetry of the Larry, by
the Larry, for the family of the Larry, shall not perish from the earth.
