TDP: Ponderable and poem for Saturday, May 8, 2010
1 view
Skip to first unread message
Alan Harris
May 8, 2010, 1:54:20 AM5/8/10
to thinkers-dai...@googlegroups.com
The wall that
protects you also confines you.
Alma Mater Revisited
The campus seems all hollow
today as I walk in its leaves again.
The marching band warms up in the
distance for a football game of
whumpgrunters and whoopleaders--
but the booming band sounds vacant.
All the music is there--the
brass, the drums, the tearing
and merging of harmonies--
but I am gone, nowhere near it.
The now magicless bookstore I worked in
has shabby Shakespeares languishing
between glossy audio-visual texts and
sterile physical geology workbooks.
Is the college hollow, or am I?
I remember classes where
cocky professors taught
stimulating sensical stuff
which flew the way of
June fireflies after exams.
Hormone-smitten twist dancers
flexed and flirted their nervous bodies
toward flippant connubialities
while I tried to study my brain into a
tested heaven of alphas.
The fatuous sounds of
today's rah-rahs echo as before
among stately buildings that housed
the tenure-drones of worked-over lectures.
Now, whom are we all trying to fool?
College is, I confess, as dead in me
as a syllogism, but supportive America
of a Saturday puts down its newspaper,
pours out a Bud Light, and
remotely emotes from its easychair over
conference headcrunching
seen through colored electrons on glass.
Who died? Did I? Are the college sounds
I hear today on my old campus--the band,
the cheers, the dead leaves underfoot--
any hollower than 25 years ago? No, no,
I heard their emptiness in youth, but
this milieu quickened me then as liberation
from a safely parented childhood
and insurance against an empty future.
After a full life I would be most ungrateful
now to pronounce college dead,
but let us stick with hollow.
*******
The campus seems all hollow
today as I walk in its leaves again.
The marching band warms up in the
distance for a football game of
whumpgrunters and whoopleaders--
but the booming band sounds vacant.
All the music is there--the
brass, the drums, the tearing
and merging of harmonies--
but I am gone, nowhere near it.
The now magicless bookstore I worked in
has shabby Shakespeares languishing
between glossy audio-visual texts and
sterile physical geology workbooks.
Is the college hollow, or am I?
I remember classes where
cocky professors taught
stimulating sensical stuff
which flew the way of
June fireflies after exams.
Hormone-smitten twist dancers
flexed and flirted their nervous bodies
toward flippant connubialities
while I tried to study my brain into a
tested heaven of alphas.
The fatuous sounds of
today's rah-rahs echo as before
among stately buildings that housed
the tenure-drones of worked-over lectures.
Now, whom are we all trying to fool?
College is, I confess, as dead in me
as a syllogism, but supportive America
of a Saturday puts down its newspaper,
pours out a Bud Light, and
remotely emotes from its easychair over
conference headcrunching
seen through colored electrons on glass.
Who died? Did I? Are the college sounds
I hear today on my old campus--the band,
the cheers, the dead leaves underfoot--
any hollower than 25 years ago? No, no,
I heard their emptiness in youth, but
this milieu quickened me then as liberation
from a safely parented childhood
and insurance against an empty future.
After a full life I would be most ungrateful
now to pronounce college dead,
but let us stick with hollow.
*******
Alan Harris
More writings by Alan Harris can be found in An Everywhere Oasis:
All ponderables and poems in these e-mails were authored by Alan Harris. Sharing is fine.
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thinker's Daily Ponderable" group.
To post to this group, send email to thinkers-dai...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to thinkers-daily-pon...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/thinkers-daily-ponderable?hl=en.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages