Her Poem "Leadership"
Boese's "Leadership" is the official state poem of the Louisiana State Senate:
- It is easy to bend with the wind and be weak,
- Wrapped in silence when it would take courage to speak,
- To do nothing when crises demand that you act;
- To prefer a delusion to unpleasant fact.
- But the easy evasions that dreamers embrace
- Are denied to a leader with problems to face.
- He must cope with the world as he finds it, and plan
- To make each hard decision as well as he can.
- He can't hide from the truth or deny what is real.
- Though a lie might assuage all the fears people feel.
- For the truth is the truth, and no lie can prevail.
- In a world that is real, one must face truth or fail.
Read more about this topic: Jean Boese
Famous quotes containing the words poem and/or leadership:
“Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“This I do know and can say to you: Our country is in more danger now than at any time since the Declaration of Independence. We don’t dare follow the Lindberghs, Wheelers and Nyes, casting suspicion, sowing discord around the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt. We don’t want revolution among ourselves.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)