Miller Williams shaped my life as a poet in 1966, and until I graduated from College in 1969. He had published his first book, Circle of Stone, in 1964, the year before I arrived at Loyola New Orleans, and the English Department was the best, IMHO, in the United States at the time. He is still my choice for the best poet in the Twentieth century and until now. I was thinking about him this morning, and a line in one of the poems in the book, in which a young boy is trying to come to grips with a God he can't see or understand, and who allows suffering and death. "I think God is a son of a bitch", the boy cries in the poem. Coping with loss and suffering is part of the human condition. Miller recited a poem at the second inauguration of Bill Clinton that strikes me, even today, as it considers our society and the doom of history that seems to repeat itself. How can we hope for a better future when we are so inept at living our present?
OF HISTORY AND HOPE
Miller Williams, 1997
We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go
But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands -- oh, rarely in a row --
and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.
Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become --
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.
All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit -- it isn't there yet --
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget. 
