Letter to a retiring professor
You’ve put in your time, you’ve paid your dues
and now it’s time to play the blues
Dig down inside, find out what’s there
Substance or only empty air,
Finally answer the call of art,
Sing the whole not just he part,
figure out what your life means
see, if you can, why you’ve been sent.
Take time to live, prepare to die,
And think about the reasons why,
turn the pages of dense thick books
to give them all your hardest looks
To think about from every angle
This persistent mental tangle:
Natural speech as given freely
can be slack or hard and steely.
if speech is slack no work can mend it
no trick can twist or turn or bend it
into something strange and free
something in a deeper key.
Art comes from an artists soul
and if that part is not yet whole,
That nothing’s up by make it so.
But here’s one way to pick those locks,
A liberating paradox.
We know art comes from deep inside
From places that are purified
But art itself, the death defying,
It can do the purifying.
It can heal the inner space.
It has just enough of grace
to loosen up the heart’s seams
and let the heart say what it means.
So work to still the world’s noise.
Clear some space for deeper joys.
First give your knowledge all away.
It will speak another day.
Burns your standards, burn them all.
They are holding you in thrall.
Give away those framed credentials,
All they were were fake potentials.
Destroy your pride and trust your heart
to give you blood to make your art.
All those dreams you wrapped with string
Get them out and make the sing.
Call no line bad if it gets written--
revise to make it hard and bitten.
Denounce the pain of bitter youth,
it contained but little truth.
The only pain that really works
that points to where the good stuff lurks,
is pain of pushing words around
until they find some firmer ground.
Silence, cunning, exile too,
there will teach you all that’s true.
Honor silence, subscribe to quiet.
Stillness brings the mind to riot
If in the end it’s all a loss,
that can be your brightest cross.
If people say you never found
the true heart’s core, the deep sound,
where mystery lived and truth lurked,
they’ll say at least by God he worked.