87th BIRTHDAY SURPRISE

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: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SBDY-4tMgY

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.