With love, and immense gratitude for being friends to me in childhood. After our last reunion, I realised how SHHS gave me the beginnings of intellectual freedom - a significance I hadn't understood before.
School Reunion
We came imagining others
would’ve attained diamonds -
against expectations, we
find we’re in this together:
turns out we always have
been, though we hadn’t understood till now
how close are
the every ways in which we intersect.
We meet few people in the
time we’re given: life’s shorter even
than we supposed. Those long-ago women held up as examples
-
Boadicea, Elizabeth,
Florence, Emmeline, dear, dear Anne Frank,
(whose story we were
told, as if we could grow up to change her ending)
- great as they were, none
of them were with us in French or Biology,
so we looked to each
other for inspiration, asked: “What will become of us?”
sang ourselves out at the
end of each school year, sentimental transitions
towards this wet summer’s
afternoon: the fullest I can remember.
It's abundant – we eat
and drink: even our dead talk with us.
Our schooldays are always between us: everything still to be discovered.
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