Proem ... unfolding with poems and prose ...

These favorite poems were, in part, imparted in the introductions to a sequence of solicited "supposals" --- sequels to a thesis and white paper entitled The Fifth Estate: Community Interactivism. While the thesis itself focused on the application of technology in the community --- e-merging then-new technology with old traditions of communication and "familiar commerce" --- a corollary study reflected on the Waterside community of Newburyport, spanning generations: past, present and future.

From this broadcloth would unfold an organic movement --- and from that a pattern for bespoken "homespun dress" --- a livery of working attire tailored to suit the public process --- in a relaxed comfortable fashion. True to the sense of movement, its reference was in "logomotion" (to use one of the Knowing Ones' neologisms) --- and was termed at various points in time: the Waterside community's Re:generation, the Waterside people's (Re)solution, the Waterside's Plan in Motion and the Waterside in a Motion of Comity ...

Cloths of Heaven
by William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Hope
by Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

From Leaves of Grass ... The Essay on Absolute Balance
by Walt Whitman, first self-published 1855

There is, apart from mere intellect, in the makeup of every superior human identity, (in its moral completeness, considered as ensemble, not for the moral alone, but for the whole being, including physique,) a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education, (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name) --- an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifarious, mad chaos of fraud, frivolity, hoggishness --- this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter.

Sonnet X from Huntsman, What Quarry?
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
[from a collection published in 1939 (link without)]

Upon this age, that never speaks its mind,
This furtive age, this age endowed with power
To wake the moon with footsteps, fit an oar
Into the rowlocks of the wind, and find
What swims before his prow, what swirls behind ---
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Falls from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts ... they live unquestioned, uncombined.

Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric; undefiled
Proceeds pure Science, and has her say; but still
Upon this world from the collective womb
Is spewed all day the red triumphant child.

(Link within to loom wisdom; link within to visit the place we can see our tomorrows dawn.)

Segue ~ Questions posed ...
by one of the Knowing Ones

And once loomed, this cloth of heaven on earth, shall it serve as a blanket to "tuck in" a bedroom community? A shroud for a dead city? A fine tapestry sagging on the wall? Or shall we hoist it as sail, unfurled to catch the wind?

Each of us has weft for the wholecloth, the broadcloth and canvas --- remnants of our dreams deferred. Why not use every fiber as thrum to save the Ship's rigging? Add it as texture, giving the cloth tensile strength for the duration? For the salvation of humankind, let us together salvage every common thread of decency as a kind of selvage edge ~ to keep all matters and things from unraveling as our history unfolds. Let us not each loosely baste the patches at their margins, for is not the fabric of community strongest as a seamless weave --- daily spun?

One Thought Ever at the Fore
by Walt Whitman [WW Old Age Echoes 1891; published 1897]