Instruction upon Arrival

0:00Hello, my name is Dan Veda, I'm recording from Washington, DC. This is my poem, Instructions Upon Arrival. Record the language as it is spoken. Learn the local names they give their flowers, ignore the Greek and Latin. The cactus that grows for a hundred years in spiny majesty. They might take you one day to that pocket canyon where trees each may become studded with flowers like trumpets, whose song must be the fragrance that hangs over the town, with a scent like nothing else in the world they'll tell you. And the names they give a dawn like this one, when the clouds are broken like sheets of ice. Save the shapes and the names of the birds, the wing-shaped chorus of sparrow or ren,

1:00the percussion of cricket and beetle, their whistling tunes and melodious song. Be warned, it will take great patience. You must ignore the interference. Do not simply call it cactus or blossom. Record with the first people called it. The dozens of names the immigrants brought, the names given by infants and scholars, the powerfully short and the linguistically long. Imagine yourself arriving a hundred years ago, strip what has come since then, and with your eyes a men to see the changes that have come. Honor this point in this land's story, where people walk and run and sleep and laugh and sometimes dream. Most of all remember, all of it is a way to proclaim home.