T H E C A M B R I D G E P O E M ~ #poetry
Commencement Address – Class of 1990 – The Cambridge School, Weston, MA
Give your regards when you go to the reunion and at the dinner,
say that you were thinking about them They’ll, eventually, recall
your name; you went to the movies with that one, felt the weight
of their life when they sat next to you – they never said a word
All of you are rising friends: one used to play the piano, one once
wrote a play, one even seemed awakened enough to photograph the
fields as the unencumbered with tutored minds and unrehearsed passions
Meet them at the door, they’ve brought the souvenirs of time; a seashell
from the Pacific, the nose of a marble saint, and from the field
a spent casing divulged from the flower bed
Face a rising world bearing its gifts in its hands, kiss your incidental
dreams – rise, move away, take others
Give your regards to the well-protected; you knew them, you went
to school together There’s something to bury when you begin
to move away When you are ready and rich in your wish for the
world, you have a new race to start
From the heart of this darkened quadrangle, I hear the library
hum, an immense chorus of writers murmur inside their books along
the unlit, alphabetical shelves; each one stitched into their
own private coat, (you will have to write your own) together forming
a continuous, enormous breath of language
I picture a figure in the act of reading, shoes on the desk, head tilted
into the wind, a person in two worlds, holding the nape of their neck
as another’s life saturates the page; or, in the middle of a thesis,
moving from paragraph to verse, touring endless rooms (you will have to write your own)
I hear the voice of my mother and father reading and inside their
voices lay other, distant sounds
I see us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of
light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail
that we follow across a page and you will have to listen hard to
hear the voices going away (and, you will have to write your own).
© 1990 Jessan Dunn (DeCredico) Otis
Jessan Dunn Otis|Writer 