The Brighter Stage Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The night maelstroms in its unisex cathedral;
Isn’t that always beautiful, like a candelabrum on an
Unbanishable ship above the students’ heads:
Those boys and girls who are always young at heart,
And they go leaping to and from their professors
Like warm glass that the artisans’ whisperings brush;
They are being made in a young man’s womb:
They are striking out right into the heart of campus
And the books sit warmly as if in a rookery six stories
Above their heads:
All of the stories of gods and goddesses that can be
Remembered:
And they sit there resting in the rains, their scars flaming
Like gasoline over teffilin; and soon they will rejoin their
Early life’s loves: And soon they will be gone forever,
But they were here once, learning about the causes of
Become:
And they will be here forever articulating to the fibrillose shadows,
Because I have caught them here like tadpoles
Where they were circumnavigating through the shallows,
Waiting to truly form and set out like hooded pioneers
Struck forth upon another even brighter stage.