Back to School by Rachel Hadas
August 26th is the first day of school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln this year. Campus is gradually filling up with professors returning to their classrooms and students returning to their studies: some probably happier about this than others. Rachel Hadas’ “Back to School” epitomizes the combined feelings of dread and rebirth that accompany the start of many school years. Published in the summer of 1984, Hadas’ poem mentions the “last gist of summer,” which, with an average temperature of 76.3°F, places in the top third of Lincoln’s warmest summers; her sky’s “soaking wrap” nods to the combined precipitation of 10.12 inches from June to September.
by Tory Clower
Rachel Hadas
Back to School
Season of mists…
The slimy windows on the bus to Princeton
uncolor everything. Container and contained,
I press my nose against the pane,
returning to the university
and feeling like a larva. Morning mists
sleekly encapsulate us drowsy passengers.
Uncomfortable metamorphosis,
September as the sloughing off of ends.
We pass the Flower Shed
looming out of rime. Its legend boasts
Floral Gifts for All Occasions,
Weddings, Christenings, Confirmations, Funerals –
anthology of initiation rites,
floridly embellished passages
from one state to another. Here we are.
The sky begins to shrug its soaking wrap
off shoulders glowing still with some last gist
of summer. Now to each of us emerging
from the husk (bus, I mean), a tall bouquet
is handed out of air – out of thick air.
The stems leak lymph that glazes our arrival.