David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

We Need You George Washington!

We need you George Washington. There’s trumpery and worse afoot in our nation’s capital. It threatens your most noble ideals. Moral bankruptcy stains the high office for which you set the standard. We need you, George Washington, more than ever.

“For happily the Government of the Untied States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” you wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island in August 1790. Your words are a salve and an antidote to the poison of hate now gripping our beloved country. Even before the First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed what you called “our liberty of conscience” you saw a nation where “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig-tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.” That vision is under assault.

Reading Funny Business in the Commercial Landscape

I delight in commercial signs that get me laughing, or at least draw a smile. Sometimes they tickle me with a visual image, but more often it’s a shop or   restaurant name that elicits a chuckle with a pun, play-on-words or other twist on the norms of language. Odd as it seems, I often find humor in the commercial landscape among the usual forest of garish and distracting roadside signs garnering for attention like so many hungry two-year olds. Of course, as a writer, I’m partial to wit with words. But we are all consumers of sentences and phrases. Looking for some funny business among business signs can only make a drive or walk more enjoyable.

Heublein Tower (New England Trail Haibun)

Like a ridgetop rocket ship readied to blast off, white Heublein Tower rises 165 feet. An ersatz summit that can’t be scaled, it carries the eye upward, lightening the heart with audacity and grandeur. Who doesn’t imagine living in this citadel of the winds?

At a barbecue pit just beyond the trail, a sheep with all the trimmings once was roasted for the politically connected. His belly full, Ike sat inside on a blue leather chair by the window and agreed to be president. Here on high, closer to dreams, Ronald Reagan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Admiral Nimitz and General Bradley enjoyed a view of the winding Farmington and western hills that scan like a stormy emerald sea.

As much icon as architecture, the tower might as well be a geological feature. Found on corporate logos, commercial designs and government images, it’s hard to imagine this place without its grand spire, its badge of belonging.

castle in the air
imaginations soaring
skyscraping the clouds

(Haibun is a marriage of prose and haiku.  It was first practiced by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho who perfected the form in a journal he kept on a trip to the remote regions of northern Japan. Gary Snyder, James Merrill, and Jack Kerouac are among American interpreters of the genre.  Haibun best expresses the spirit of the New England Trail because it combines clear-eyed prose descriptions of people, objects and places along with poetry that awakens the imagination.)

The New England National Scenic Trail, a unit of the National Park Service, runs 215 miles from Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/ New Hampshire border.  The trail is maintained by volunteers of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association in Connecticut and the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts.  For more go to https://newenglandtrail.org/