50 years

(for Lisa Morgan and the Oakmont High School class of 1976)

As if we needed proof in mimeographed
form, on printed programs with only
a small stain testifying to the decades,

the summation of our high school lives
lies on your mother’s kitchen counter,
our names wafting up like 1970s incense,

evidence of the girls we were. And the boys,
too, your mom’s tidy cursive inked on
the program of scholarship winners.

Two days later—fifty years ago today—
we commenced on the quad, you and I
hatted and gowned, rising from our places

in the band to take our spots in line
for diplomas with our classmates,
our parents and teachers looking on,

I imagine, with relief. Then we raced
back to the band to Pomp and Circumstance
one last time before we all vanished

into the ether, to whatever we
might make of our budding lives.
You, the yearbook editor,

me, the newspaper editor,
two girls good with words who divided
our hearts between the band room

and Room 206, where so many
publications were born. As were we,
though I doubt we knew it then.

We study the vintage documents now
like the historical artifacts they are—
our mothers peering over our shoulders,

our fathers nearby, too, all of them gone,
but not—unable to quite conjure
the particulars of who we were.

But there we are, on paper, all 204
graduates marching into the country’s
bicentennial, with, as they used to say,

our whole lives ahead of us, we two
artifacts ourselves, stunned by
the where-did-it-all-go-ness

of an all-too-quick half a century
embodied in your brilliantly
prophetic yearbook theme

that neither of us has forgotten:
So sad, so strange,
the days that are no more.

Jan Haag, 1976 Oakmont High School senior photo (Bill Smith Photography)