There is a sadness certain in the leaving.

I have mentioned many times on this blog that I will be retiring from teaching after 42 years this June. Since 1968, when I first stepped into a classroom, I have taught thousands of children. Many of these children went on to lead successful and productive lives. As a matter of fact, my first class turns 60 years old this year. Many of the children I have taught were "challenges," coming from dysfunctional families, and had difficult lives. And some, for whatever reason, had lives cut short by violence, drunk driving accidents or health problems. I have been to a lot of proms and graduations over the years. I have also been to more funerals than I had ever cared to. There never seems to be a believable justification for a young death. Poets have written about such deaths over the history of literature in a vain attempt to make sense out of such a loss.

Two days ago, one of my former students, Terry Paul, passed away at the age of 21. He was in a college classroom, taking a test when he had a seizure and his heart stopped. He was a gifted student, a talented young man who excelled in track and in oil painting,and a kind and generous soul, more mature and wise than most high school seniors. One of his paintings hangs in my office opposite my desk, a gift he gave me when he graduated from our high school three years ago. It is a reminder of his talent as well as our loss.

I am posting two poems today. One, by A.E. Housman, is a well-known poem called "To an Athlete Dying Young." The other, one of my own, written as a poem about autumn; but one that, at this time, speaks of how I feel today.

To an Athlete Dying Young
A. E. Housman

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields were glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.




The Leaving
Christopher Bogart

There is a sadness certain in the leaving.

In the falling,
Sad flight begins
As slow, mournful drift

Down.

It is there
I sit
on cold, damp ground

Below.

I speak
in somber distant sounds,

While through the bright
And leaving drift

I sift
Through sad stories
of the deaths
of petty princes
and of dying kings.