Fireworks over Green Lake in Seattle, July 4, 1947, courtesy of MyGreenLake.com

The 4th of July is the essence of summer. It's also the essence of the U.S. It takes place right at that golden moment, when the weather has grown hot but not too hot. People spill out of their homes in the evening with baskets and coolers full of American food and American beer. Blankets are spread, and bare feet touch grass. Everyone comes together, to one place, laughing and smiling and playing like children, and the fireworks, always bigger than remembered, crackle in the night sky.

Some people say that so much time has passed that holidays have begun to lose their meaning, but what better way to celebrate being free than to relax under the summer sky, listening to country singers try to define freedom to a twangy tune? What better way than to see and feel and experience things that just cannot be replicated anywhere else in the world?

I hope that everyone has an amazing Independence Day this year! Here's a little poem I love that is just right for the occasion. Not only does it remind me of the end of every 4th, it is beautiful and makes me lay back and think, as a good poem should.


Good Night 
by Carl Sandburg, 1920

Many ways to say good night.

Fireworks at a pier on the Fourth of July
         spell it with red wheels and yellow spokes.
They fizz in the air, touch the water and quit.
Rockets make a trajectory of gold-and-blue
         and then go out.

Railroad trains at night spell with a smokestack mushrooming a white pillar.

Steamboats turn a curve in the Mississippi crying a baritone that crosses lowland
cottonfields to razorback hill.

It is easy to spell good night.
        Many ways to spell good night.