Opinion

Dear editor:
“To our Republican leaders: Get off your high horse. To claim that you are a better Republican than another because you consider yourself as such is the Salem Witch Trials all over again.”
After this year’s state Republican convention, ongoing in Cheyenne, and reading reports of the happenings at the convention, it reaffirms my belief that our party is on a slippery slope that will lead our party to an undesirable place.

100 years ago
April 24, 1924
OIL BOOM THAT FAILED-Had One Bad Day...Well, we had one wild day anyway and some folks say they feel better because of the excitement.
80 years ago
April 28, 1944
Under the supervision of the American Legion Post, a thorough waste paper collection campaign will begin at once. There has always been an urgent need for waste paper in the war industries and to boost the nation’s pulp supply.

To wrap up April, a month of seemingly nothing but poems, I’ve circled back to a poet I haven’t read as much in my adult life as I did when I was a teen, Langston Hughes. Hughes was the founder and leader of the Harlem Renaissance movement, an activist and a journalist. “Tired,” from 1931, somehow reaches across the time and sums up just how I feel in 2024 when I look at the world, go online, or turn on cable news. In part, it reads, “I am so tired of waiting / aren’t you / for the world to become good / And beautiful and kind?”

National Poetry Month continues, so this week I returned to my pile of saved poems and decided to write about not one, but two: Gwendolyn Brook’s “To the Young Who Want to Die” and Ross Gay’s “Sorrow Is Not My Name.” Ordinarily, I wouldn’t choose to write about two different poems from two different writers at the same time, but the fact is that one would not exist without the other: they are in dialogue with each other. And anyway, they’re both wonderful and very dear to me.