" ...Long has it waved on high/ And many an eye has danced to see/ That banner in the sky..."

These are the opening lines of an 1830 poem by the American Oliver Wendell Holmes titled Old Ironsides, the nickname for America's three masted frigate U.S.S. Constitution which took on and defeated the British frigate Guerriere in the War of 1812. The Guerriere's cannon shot bounced off the heavy-hulled sides of the Constitution like leaden balls off iron, in a useful metaphor for the young nation's vision of the place of the rule of law in a world based on commerce and power. A nation still building up symbols of identity and purpose; and after nearly 40 years of active service, in 1830, the Constitution was bound for the breaker's yard. Hence Holmes's poem, which crescendos in that amazing set of no-they-shan't lines:

"...The Harpies of the shore shall pluck/ The eagle of the sea."

And in the end they couldn't. You can still visit the U.S.S. Constitution in Boston Harbor today. Such is the value of belief in the Future and the Past. And creativity.

When I was in about the third or fourth grade at St. Anne's in Denver - which I see now in retrospect was a remarkable and remarkably diverse convent-based school, possibly with children of all religions or none, but certainly American Indian, disabled, Black, and children like myself who were white - we learned the poem together by heart, and what I've written above comes from memory, and may be wrong. We also sang songs ("Tenting Tonight"; "St. Patrick's hymn"), and had two secular teachers, sisters in the non-religious sense who were both retired from the state's public school system, who could and did tell us about the foundation of Colorado as a state, and their entering a candidate for the state song; and about the fields and farms which surrounded us at the school and all the roads to it, but were now gone, as Denver had swelled outward in houses, industries and businesses. We were given immediate access to meanings of time, the past, and purpose.