After all, we are a campus defined by our waterfront on the St. Mary’s College, however, we take the poem to refer to us.
What counts is our wide-eyed openness to theĪt St. In the end, it doesn’t matter what the “this” and the “that” are. But it also functions as a possessive pronoun-you can go forth confident because we have your back. I also enjoy Lucille’s word play in “love your back.” The “your” sounds like Black dialectic for “you,” pointing to confidence that love will remain even when the one who loves is absent. In Lucille’s poem, I love the image of the wind, a divine spirit that propels and that will be with the sailors always. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing–he had been there, and he knew. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. Sonny’s brother sees how hesitant Sonny is about playing again but also notes how the band leader is assuring him that all will be well: The image of waving, incidentally, reminds me of the penultimate paragraph in the James Baldwin short story “Sonny’s Blues” where Sonny’s fellow jazz musicians are trying to entice him back into music after a prison stint for heroine. Those who are waving from the shore ask only for a momentary kiss and then accept that our children and students will be focused on the horizon and on the “water/ water waving forever.” The adventurers may be fearful and they may be passing beyond the lip of our understanding, but they can rest assured that they will have the wind of love-of their parents, teachers, and friends-supporting them. It is about people venturing into the unknown and about other people, those who love them, letting them go. For it is not, of course, only about boats. In this way, the poem serves to put a frame around the St. This poem is inscribed on the wall of our campus center so that students will see it on their way to the dining hall. There are almost always boats on the river and we have long had one of the top sailing programs in the country. A modern replica of the Dove is pictured above.Īt St. It commemorates the blessing of the Arc and the Dove in England, which set off with the first English settlers in Maryland in 1633. The title refers to the Blessing of the Fleet that occurs every October at St. mary’s).” As I explain below, it was written while Lucille was a colleague at St. Yesterday I mentioned Lucille Clifton’s poem “blessing the boats (at st. A replica of the Dove, which landed in St.
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