This one was--
I worked with an amazing designer.
She's a minimalist installation artist from Belgium
and really doesn't say much, but she's a true still waters
run deep person.
And I love--
I'd bring her a poem and she'd come back
with something that would always surprise me.
But this one I didn't like, and it was a learning experience
for me.
I thought, oh, chains and plastic.
Huh, not natural.
But when we had our celebrations,
we brought Joe, Joseph Bruchac, who's now
one of our poets and residents.
And Joseph is Abenaki.
He read and I read, and we had some of the scientists
come and talk about the project and so forth.
And then afterwards, an old friend--
I was a green gorilla when I lived in New York.
And green gorillas-- when HUD came in and was tearing down
buildings, we went around and began to ask people what they
wanted to do with their vacant lots and started the gardening
movement that Bette Midler has recently come in and given
millions of dollars to save--
because once people put in gardens,
they wanted those gardens to stay there.
So my friend, one of the early green gorillas,
is a woman named Tessa Huxley--
she's Aldous Huxley's granddaughter.
And she was at this celebration, and she had her son there.
And the son had to go to a soccer meeting,
so she was kind of rushed to get him to the soccer meeting.
But we went on a tour with Joe Bruchac,
and she kept saying, I've got to get him, he's really late.
He's going to miss the whole game.
But he's reading.
And what this does is it throws green light out on the sidewalk
and it's right at kid level.
And the kids get down on their hands and knees
and read this poem that I'm going
to read to you now by Palestinian-American poet Naomi
Shihab Nye.
"Famous."
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the Earth before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the bird house.
The tear is famous briefly to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the Earth-- more famous
than the dress shoe, which is famous only to floors.
The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous
or a buttonhole-- not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.