 Thank you, Jack, and friends of the library and all the poets in San Francisco who create the atmosphere for this. America in present tense, and there's a historical note to this. The reference in this poem is to the workman's circle, which, with similar organizations not only helped forge the unions, but put in place for their members those benefits and rights while they fought to legislate them for all workers. America in present tense, the past is present, Jefferson crafting from ideas and thought both his house and the shape of a nation, Lincoln pausing amid war and opposition to send words of hope to a widow, to the survivors, to the future. My great-grandparents, selling everything but clothes and memories, taking ship to become strangers in a foreign-tongued future for life, for their children's education, and their children using that schooling and the dream to fight unfeeling greed for a living wage, laboring late under the lamp light, studying, meeting, to shape what people working in union could do, win the right to vacations and build a country camp to enjoy them, combine to pay doctors for members hurt and sick, create a safe haven for those who live to retire. Other heritages tell other ancestral tales, and the richness and strength of this land includes this generation now stooping in the hot fields, living the tales their lawyer and teacher-grandchildren will tell. Let us embrace the strength, the courage, the selflessness, the risk of being unpopular, denounced, defamed, insulted, scorned as those before us were, to deserve what we have inherited enough to pass it on.