Monday Morning Poem

I guess I can’t complain too much that today is Monday – it’s a short week in the office, after all. But that’s really of little consolation. It’s still Monday and I still wish it wasn’t. Worse than that, it’s Monday morning, the worst morning of them all.

On November 19, 1863 President Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most important speeches in American History. The Gettysburg Address lasted a mere two minutes, but its words have remained ever since.

Abraham Lincoln delivered the momentous speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania during the dedication of the military cemetery there. Many people believe that Lincoln quickly wrote the address on the back of an envelope on his way to the ceremony, but the President had actually started the speech long before that date, as he was planning on making a public statement about the struggle against slavery and the over all significance of the war.

More at History.com – This Day in History

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

More on the Gettysburg Address at Wikipedia.org