Class of ’63 High School Reunion

I attended my high school reunion, it happened last week:
we’d graduated fifty-five years earlier, an amazing streak.
It was good to see friends from a lifetime long past,
when times were much simpler, and life wasn’t so fast.

I saw friends, I saw girls whom I’d loved from afar,
I saw those who’d been athletes, those who’d had a car.
I saw others who’d always been much smarter than I
and those who’d been outspoken and those who were shy.

We told stories, most of which were funny indeed,
from a time when our naïve minds rarely took heed,
when common sense too often flew way out the door,
until adulthood made us eventually appreciate the score.

But most of all we reveled in our friendship, our history,
from a period when ethics and morals were no mystery.
We were born from that synchrony, from that ancestral leg,
as if we had all hatched from the same primordial egg.

BUT (and this is true):

As one who came from afar, I credit our reunion team,
who arranged for our venue, to which we would stream.
At the local country club, our reservation we’d redeem,
on the eighteenth of August, two thousand eighteen.

But then the worst happened, we could not have foreseen,
when a younger reunion class did conspire, plot and scheme,
to invalidate our site that months before was our theme,
in their favor, so wrong and unfair we wanted to scream.

So what are we to make of this sleight of hand so extreme,
that a sister high school class could so lower our esteem?
Had values so diminished—ten years later lost their sway—
from when honesty and fairness were proudly our ‘63 way?

Categorised in: Poetry

This post was written by paulmarktag