It’s just pure joy that we have poets among our college community and that, sometimes, we get to publish their words. This week, the dedication of the new Cassandra Voss Center on campus was the occasion for a new poem, too. It’s author, Laurie MacDiarmid (English), was one of Cassandra’s teachers. Poem for Cassandra All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. –Walt Whitman At the end of another August, maple leaves flutter in a welcome breeze, sighing shade in soft smiles over the sidewalks, over the mown lawns and gleaming dogs, proud on the ends of their leashes, over the neighbor who pinches a last delicate rose from its thorny stem, over children who dive and swoop across the grass like sparrows, still free but smelling the hot start of September with its chalky classrooms, their arithmetic drone like the buzz of a thousand bees. In this drowsy comfort, we might feel the shape of your body’s absence – a delicate silhouette, a sudden shadow in the shape of an angel, slipping past overhead – we might feel the shape of your absence and shiver, imagining the human things [...]
↧