IF YOU’RE NOT IN IT TO WIN THEN DON’T BOTHER

Never attempt anything you are unwilling to actually win.

Turks, you had the guts to try, I’ll give you that, and to your credit, but what is momentary courage without the determination to finish the job?

You may very well now deeply regret the one without the other.

And so will, I suspect, a lot of other people as well…

Next time, be resolute.

THE RED TRACTOR – FIRST VERSE

A poem I began this weekend. I am usually not much for modern poetry but in this case I thought the juxtapositioning of that kind of poetry against the subject matter fit very well. I am also not posting the entire poem here as I intend to publish it.

THE RED TRACTOR

“Love demands infinitely less than friendship.”

                                                                                   George Jean Nathan

If I could admire a machine
As I admire a man it would be you
You were tough and you were strong, you did not relent
You were fit for tasks for which you were not
Designed and yet you mastered

*    *    *

One day I shall show my grandchildren the green and open
Fields we cleared and I shall say,

“Here we pushed back the frontier together,
he and I, my old friend. Here we hauled
and carried and labored and strained
and cut and leveled. This is because
we were as we were, and he was stalwart
and faltered not. I wish you could have
known him before the end, on the
border of what was wild forever we finally
made tame. What was chaos we ordered.
What was savage we made fit.”

And they will say,

“papa! it was only a tractor!”

And I shall remember fully the fields we made, ground we claimed, land we
Tamed. Uncertain Earth we took foot by foot from the long dry summers and the
Shower soaked springs with restless toil. The memories shall return to me of how
I repaired you endlessly and with great effort and frustration,
And yet did you always abide…