Author: [no author name found]
War debt
(on taking my son to college)
Amy McGill, associate director of the Center for Educational Technology
Yesterday,
it seems,
you watched the world heavily
from my hip:
across the lawn,
an old Hmong woman
tended her plot,
her terraced fields
reduced to a tiny square of Vermont clay
behind the rambling parsonage,
where parish charity
gave her a break on the rent.
Then she was walking toward us,
a lifetime bending her back,
generations of women
looking out of her eyes.
She held out a narrow apron
of finely quilted cloth--
strips of red,
pieced with an intricate mosaic
of multi-colored diamonds and triangles.
She pointed to you,
made wrapping motions with her hands,
the language of mothers
needing no translation.
****
Today,
we roll across Wisconsin.
Green hills
stretch out to cover more ground,
looking like
a softer Vermont.
I try not to think
how long it will be
until Christmas,
how long it has been,
since you perched on my back
in a Hmong sling.
****
In the St. Paul hotel lobby,
waiting to leave you to your growing up,
I slide my quarters into the slot,
lift a paper from the stack.
"MOTHER KILLS SIX CHILDREN."
The oldest is eleven,
the mother, twenty-four --
a Hmong refugee,
a child left to wander, motherless
through a packing-crate village
in a sea of mud,
washing up, finally,
in a strange, cold city,
caught in a web of little hands reaching,
always grasping
for something she didn't have,
couldn't give.
The heritage of knowing,
mother to daughter,
that should have been hers
came down instead to me,
wrapped in the patterns
and colors of her people.
*****
Mother to son,
I give you back to yourself,
to the world,
a down-payment
on all that I owe.
Untitled
Ian Ausprey '04
A newscaster from New York
Said he could see between the skyline
Where the Twin Towers once stood.
"It is amazing
How empty
Space can feel."
His office window
Caught the glint of water
Off the bay
That should have been steel
Gray against the sky
And armed with the conviction
America builds her buildings by.
He said
Space filled the city
Squeezed amongst the taxis
And into the vertebrae of passersby,
Craned by habit to catch what they knew
Was empty:
"We have a mind
to fill space,"
he said.
And when the camera reel stops
And the war ticker-tape pauses
And the commentator mentions
that the news is much more eventful
than it used to be
The newscaster looks from his office
Onto the steel blue bay
And finds space, for
A new view:
Now Lady Liberty
Appearing
Constant
Where the skyline
Lies fallen
And all the more visible
Her torch in hand.
From this break in space
He wonders
If Liberty had ever been seen so clearly.
Untitled
Harrison Kahn '05
There is an orchard in morning,
Burning and Browning,
Where the worms and gulls bark
In the halls downtown.
I, visiting that crabgrass
all raintorn,
Veer to the perimeter,
Near the sky
at the end of the hallway,
Kneel and bow,
Ear-deep in the river.
Poetry On Life in the New Millenium
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