American Life in Poetry

Sun., Sept. 6, 2015

Ted Kooser U.S. Poet Laureate

How could we publish a column about American Life in Poetry without including a poem about a high school reunion? This is from Barbara Crooker’s “Selected Poems” from Futurecycle Press. She lives in Pennsylvania.

25th reunion

A quarter of a century

since we left high school,

and we’ve gathered at a posh restaurant.

A little heavier, a little grayer,

we look for the yearbook pictures

caught inside these bodies of strangers.

Some of our faces are etched with lines,

the faint tracing of a lover’s touch,

and some of our hair is silver-white,

a breath of frost. And some of us are gone.

But he’s here, the dark angel,

everyone’s last lover, up at the microphone

singing Save the last dance for me;

he’s singing a cappella, the notes rising

sweetly, yearningly toward the ceiling,

which is now festooned with tissue flowers,

paper streamers, balloons.

And we’re all eighteen again,

lines and wrinkles erased, gray hairs gone,

our slim bodies back, the perfect editing.

A saxophone keens its reedy insistence;

scents of gardenias and tea roses float in the air

from our wrist corsages and boutonnieres.

No children or lovers have broken our hearts,

it’s just all of us, together,

in our fresh young skin,

ready to do it all over again.

Poem copyright 2015 by Barbara Crooker from “Selected Poems” (Futurecycle Press, 2015) and reprinted by permission of the author and publisher. American Life in Poetry is supported by the Poetry Foundation and the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited submissions.

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