Thanksgiving Poems - Reindeer

Angel Island immigrant celebration: 'These are our roots'

22.07.11

The day also will be a family affair for Andrea Louie Johnson of Tiburon, whose grandmother, Kim Jones, was detained at Angel Island for 90 days in 1910, when she passed through with her family as a youngster. "She had her first Thanksgiving there, and her first turkey, and really liked that, " Johnson said. Renee Lym Robertson, 83, of San Francisco, Lim Lip Hong's granddaughter, said he had seven children, including her father, Art Lym, who was trained as a pilot by the Wright brothers and later headed the Chinese air force. The Lim Lip Hong clan plans a day of family reunion revelry ending with a banquet in San Francisco's Chinatown Saturday night. One of his sons, Robert, a photographer who worked for a time with immigration officials on Angel Island, knew the importance of chronicling family members and local residency. Lim Lip Hong family. "It's pretty amazing to think of her being there," Johnson said, adding young Kim's memories of island life weren't all that terrible. She's looking forward to Saturday's celebration, calling it a golden opportunity to teach newer generations about the family's storied history.

Source: Marin Independent-Journal

In Thanksgiving for Naming

18.07.11

That a priest-poet should laud language and give thanks for the gift of it and praise poetry and prose is surely fitting. His own poem certainly has more than an element of &lsquo. Also fitting is the praise of the divine capacity for naming things. In the same grateful vein Peter unpacks a poem he wrote on the offertory prayers of the Eucharist. A representative of the Christian branch of the People of the Book is, or should be, a guardian and exemplar of the God-given grace of language and mutual human intelligibility. The thanks he is thinking about here are cosmic in scope and naturally the bread and wine are symbols for the creation which God saw to be &lsquo. the long spilling of the language&rsquo. He brims over with thanks for all manner of quirky things, from the artefacts of our early ancestors to Chinese loess (sediment formed by the accumulation of wind-blown silt) and the rice terraces of Luzon in the Philippines. One wonders how much poetry he has read. The current fashion among some secular thinkers to project Christianity as the source of all the muzzling of the freedom of human expression, is surely disingenuous.

Source: America Magazine (subscription) (blog)