The present poet laureate of the United States is Donald Hall. I've read some of his work, my favorite being "Names of Horses." He celebrates the work animal with reminiscence of their labor and toil. He turns very melancholy by the end of the poem and relates the killing of a draft horse by putting a slug in its brain to put it out of its old age misery. He ends with sad recall of some names: "O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost." I've placed this poem in an eclectic collection I've put together with other favorites, my only criterion being I like them and they speak to me in some way.
I will have a lot more to say about poets and poetry in the future, but it's a book of Hall's prose, String too Short to Be Saved, that I turn to now. Its sub-title pretty much sums up the gist of the book, Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm, and the prologue of the book tells you the type of people he grew up with: "A man was cleaning the attic of an old house in New England and he found a box which was full of tiny pieces of string. On the lid of the box there was an inscription in an old hand: 'String too short to be saved.'"
I find that humorous on the surface, but I have known many people who maintained that philosophy of saving any and all. We throw things away. Goods and products we presently use generate plenty of garbage, and land fills choke with detritus. Old timers, however you wish to define them, would probably have gone into modern dumpgrounds to retrieve items they perceived to be useful. There's no reason to pursue this idea any further except to say that times sure have changed.
