New Poetry by Robert H. Demaree Jr.

LINES WRITTEN THE DAY AFTER VIRGINIA’S GRADUATION, MAY 30, 1984

The gym is empty now--

Graduation was last night.

The polished floor is lightly scuffed

By the shoes of girls in long white dresses:

The rented chairs are stacked against the wall,

And beside them yesterday’s magnolias and

My orange extension cord

And the discarded programs,

Where you said they’d be.

Last night I shared my daughter’s joy

With the calmness of a minister at a wedding,

Or a funeral:

A school man on a working day.

But something has come to me today,

Walking the halls,

Picking up after graduation:

Here is where she stood last night to give her speech,

And here is where she sat laying out the newspaper,

And here her desk for calculus or English,

Or where she tried out for cheerleader:

And here are all the places of the part of her life

We thought was ours

But is no more.

An empty school, the day after graduation,

In the cool and eerie light of the sun’s eclipse--

They say this will not happen again

For thirty years or so:

I wonder if I shall see it.

The men are moving the rented organ now,

And I suppose that if I leave the flowers where they are today

They will still be there in September,

Dried, brittle, incongruous against the opening of school.

It has dawned on me thorough this day’s strange, dream-like light

That I have indeed lived to see her coming forth:

My tears belong to ritual,

As you said they would.

It has dawned on me through this day’s strange, dream-like light

That Virginia doesn’t go to school here anymore.

The men carrying away the rented chairs

Disrupt the practice of the cheerleaders:

My younger daughter squints in the now-bright sun of noontime

And plans with friends for other days.

- Robert H. Demaree Jr., 2012

Robert retired in 2001 after 42 years as a teacher and administrator in schools in the Southeastern U.S. He has family ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire; thus he hopes that his interest in what Donald Hall calls “a pleasure of place” does not preclude a look at a larger landscape.