To the Professors at Trinity

This poem was written a number of years ago in response to a sculpture of a grouping of professors/teachers by Simon O'Donnell. Tongue in cheek, the poem pokes fun at the traditional rituals of universities and "old boy" schools and colleges; it could as easily be directed at the wigged personages officiating in our courts.

 

 

 

 

  The Circle.

 

Now dried tobacco leaves, these professors,

 

whose intellectual travails have scoured them skinny,

 

are engaged in the Spring ritual on the back lawn at Trinity.

Stripped naked, buttocks slung low over the crew-cut grass,

 

hands beating mortar boards; they sway on their haunches,

 

loosening the centuries' compaction of soil grains. 

 

Some say they are whipping up the aurae of their forebears,

 

others that they are resonating with the pain of earthworms

 

as they shift, right to left, on the balls of their feet. 

 

At the center, standing on a box, a physics-doctor

 

with plumb-line hanging from between forefinger and thumb

 

is demonstrating down. 

 

I have watched them for an age, seen their growth rings

 

appearing like water-marks, the knowledge in their face-pouches

 

guarded like genitalia in a bag.