The 1948 Class Poem

Now, just this close upon Memorial Day, Before the leaves of the wreaths on the graves Have shriveled dry, crumbled to the touch, Or blown away The survivors come.

And there will be some, Men still with sand in their mouths, Turned from fox-holes To sun-bathing in the cemetery, Who—balancing books against beach-heads-Will question where was education more: Three years of extra-curricular war, Or academy's traditional four?

Who shall ask this question Shall wait an answer long down the list of years, Shall watch Hope hiss and go out As Failure spills on it, And the silent smoke of old fears Rise over the ashes....

But even for each of us There have been small times out of place When, in our headlong haste Going club-footed through curriculum, To smash the bric-a-brac of waste We thought it more to taste To forbid the Commonplace-Found nothing to be read, learned, nor praised; Overthrew the Temple Before the Temple had been raised.

Piqued by procrastination in times of arrears, We could only put triangular punctures Into cans of beer. Tarawa rolls up to the Statler bar, 1600 D-Day-plus-one in the Biltmore Lounge The afternoon descends; The night comes on.

Well, what is there to remember Among so much forgetting?

But an urgency invades Across the conversation and the cocktails. The professorial note rudely scrawled Between the neatly typed lines Stands out like neon on Monday morning.

The morning sun creeps into the untidy room, Makes spectrums in the unwashed highball glasses, Glares gray into the overflowing ashtray,

Covers the bent corpses of yesterday's cigarettes, Stills the echo of last night's laughter.

Now the pen begins to scratch across the ruled paper, The emphatic typewriter clacks and dings, The brass-blast of jazz Disturbs, confounds Beethoven's fate, The lamps burn late, The teeth clamp small thoughts into the pencils, Literature goes on living Even after the lights are out In the library.

Wear Brooks clothes, white shoes all thetime

And suddenly yesterday becomes A soft other time of April. Spring has it in her hard-headed reason To make herself a growing season, And we find ourselves Balanced with brides and the fiscal year Between the soft-footed finality Of a day of memorial, And the rocket-zoom, crackle, bands and bunting Of a day of independence. Some happy, some tired, some bored, some proud, Capped and gowned as dark as dignity Or as black as any shroud-Depending on your focus.

Who is he now can say What it is he should have gained Or better missed? The lost lines of poetry, The forgotten formulas, The lips once kissed Cold above the snow Was there never an hour That wasn't the hour of decision? Never a moment that didn't topple onto tomorrow? How many degrees of black are there That we can say this, this is the blackest hour of them all?

Now for us is still the time of Road signs, the tourist camps, The antique shops, The green shutters on white-washed brick, The picture postcards, The Purita.n spires stark in the sky. Time will discover for us That the old river, Spring-filled with flood, Plunges over the dam, Staggers, recovers, pushes itself on. Not all the rocks have been dug Out of the high pasture-land.

The books on the shelves Lean left against themselves For want of one to make the line upright. Not now at noon Can we put the missing in place; We must wait until the night.