Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, May 21st, 2024.

Today's poem is by Matthews A Pruder, and it's called Graduation Day.

This is a confessional kind of poem that speaks for many educators, perhaps particularly anyone working in higher education,

but not exclusively.

Because there is this secret about the teacherly vocation that teachers don't always get it

right.

Teachers are fallible humans.

And the more systematized education becomes,

the more those fallibilities are piled up, to become the brick and mortar of what you're engaged in. And for that, sometimes an apology is necessary, and sometimes the best thing you can do is

get to the other side and escape, as this poem suggests.

Here is graduation day.

Drawn by ceremonial obligation up from sleep, I woke and stepped into the borrowed black robes,

all ghost bureaucrats trained to redirect dreaming, pretend we do not like to wear.

I drove my black car to the stadium to sit on a stage and be watched, watching young expectant

spirits one by one, with dread

certainty passed before me, clouded in their names.

Then listened to no one in their speeches say,

You're welcome for allowing us not to tell you it's already too late to learn anything,

or defend whatever accidental instrument in us causes all these

useless thoughts.

Like if you walked for hours through the vast black avenues of those server farms all of us

...