Reunion Coming

The lighter than air message came

Over the air waves     causing

Years to circle behind me around

Coming on in a wave, and seeing

A school with some faces     smiling.

The class of people are carrying along

The American generation tradition.

Fifty-nine years in the cities have not change me.

Which others were turned and which not?

I could not think of my school

And I began to think of my school now

When the desk shaped all the fragments

Of the learning altered

For the good of all   when I sat dreaming

Four years, paging books in the library

Fatigued by every word    of the blackboard

Of talented caulk letters

Forming powdery equations

And prepositions running on with poetry

Of Frost and Dickinson.

All the while I could not speak of

How the day dreams began

How the hormones jumped their turn

How the note taking ended

And all the reminisce of days

Collect gently up,

But the hail Marys claimed a host

To live as a child, and so

In this out of state home

Around the colored plants that bloom

With the sun on a cloudless day

And the walk-in packed with tinted clothes,

I yet have to wonder  -  old wonder  - 

Of the principles given to use

For daily tools: for check writing and typing

Jobs as hitherto unborned

It had to be a place in the new world

That I recalled graduation’s last day;

In that class, for the somber height was soaring

In overload, like the pop songs of the fifties

Promising euphoria to come.  Moving beyond family:

Short comings abound on the voyage of building.

Mostly, desperate lineage about the towns, surviving

The noble stand taken.

Sometimes voices, close voices of sober equals

Coming near with the café serving

And ads guarantying everything

On the windswept curbs;

My career and my job’s work cycled

In engineering, marketing, business.

But when I think of achievement

With the most of what was done - that remarkable spark

Of hail Marys hovering nearby at times.

I think of invitations

And wonder what to say

If accepted, if the other road taken,

If all was said before,

In the class of learning.