The Un-national Monument

A Poem by William Stafford as Posted by Garrison Keillor

At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed-or were killed-on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

Garrison Keillor first posted this poem on the Writer’s Almanac on February 1, 2007, which happened to be the anniversary of Langston Hughes birth in 1902. Keillor posted the poem again last year on February 1st. I would not know those things were it not for a friend who mentioned the poem in passing during a Zoom call. My friend’s mention of a poem about the border between Canada and the United States caused me to do what I do all too often, spend way too much time on internet search engines. Drilling down on what was a casual reference to a relatively obscure piece of poetry, I learned a few odd facts I never knew including facts about William Stafford who was a pacifist and well regarded poet, Langston Hughes who wrote for the ordinary people "who have their hip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round," and Garrison Keillor who “retired” from Prairie Home Companion on July 1, 2016, over one year before the inappropriate sexual behavior kerfuffle came to light. I also learned that “hip of gin” doesn’t seem to be solidly defined anywhere but may refer to Prohibition Era bathtub gin.

What, you might ask, is the point of my hapless search for information. Fair question that is. The point is that it triggered in my mind a memory of the word Ankose, associated with the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. According to the website of the National Gallery the word emerged from “conversations with Algonquin Elders and Knowledge Keepers” during the pandemic era. The word is Anishinaabemowin in origin and it means “everything is connected,” “tout est relié.” Ankosé has become the “brand” of the Canadian gallery and its massive collection of visual arts. That gallery when I first visited it led me to Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, pillars in the education of every Canadian school child of a certain age, just as American school children of the same era learned of Hemingway and Faulkner. And then out nowhere, as if to prove the point that everything is connected, Toni Morrison’s essay “The Site of Memory” came to mind. In her essay she mentions how the Mississippi River got “straightened” out in places to make for more tillable land and housing sites. She goes on to write, “Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Flood’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be.”

I am writing this rather lengthy introduction to explain how I hope to use this substack to incorporate entries from a travel journal which is currently housed at Wordpress with a web address of mymemory.blog. The title of the journal is “Memories – A Second Chance at Happiness.” "Good memories are a second chance at happiness, a quote from HM Queen Elizabeth II” forms the basis of the journal’s title. Each entry describes a different state in the union in something like the chronological order in which I visited the state and did something meaningful while there (pass throughs don’t count). I hope to learn how to navigate substack well enough to move the journal here and develop my goal of making this substack about travel and memory and how the two are related. Memory colors everything we do. Facts can be turned into lies. Memories may fade away or become distorted with time. Whatever happens with memories they remain personal to us. Sometimes it is helpful to just write them down, turn the page, and move on to the next day in our life in order to create new memories.