Centennial (Poem)

Centennial by David Starkey, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate, SBCC English ProfessorAs it was read, by the author at the Centennial Kick-off, August 20, 2009

I, too, have had my doubts,as when the student not turning inher essay, again, looks at me blankly, uncertain why I place such value on punctuality. There's more to life than school, and anyway her phone is buzzing in her purse. All she wantsis to answer. She's too tired to wonderabout her professors, our passions and persuasions and peccadilloes.

Certain seasons-this one comesto mind-breed skepticism.Conversations halt, mid-sentence.The part-time counselor gapesat the line of students waitinganxiously to see her, a line that stretches around the corner and out the door. The administrator unfurls the latest spreadsheets, thinking, Oh, no, it can't be done.

And yet, finally, it must be done,as it has for one hundred years,since before the earthquakeand the blowout at Platform A,before the two World Warsand the wars in Korea, Vietnamand Iraq, wars that have taken some of our best students, but sent us others-battered but earnest, willing to fightto be heard in a world that would prefernothing more than their silence.

And so we celebrate this anniversarylike a long-married couple: awareof our foibles, but choosing to dwell instead on pleasant memories: the fifth year student, transferring at last, flinging his hat into the air at graduation;the single mother stepping off the bus with her backpack and her child; the men and women milling outside their night classesduring break-the smell of coffeeand the last basket of chicken fingers.Then, drifting in from the darkness, smoke from those delicious, because illicit, surreptitious cigarettes.

Some mornings the fog rolls inand you can hear the waveswithout seeing them. Yet the ocean,we know, is always there,and it's this faith that the fogwill lift that keeps us walkingto our classes, marking papers, standing in front of a roomful of strangers hoping that in fifteen weeks they, and we-all of us-will become slightly less strange.