Kaui Hart Hemmings

Sometimes I loved the disruptive student in class who livened up lectures with wisecracks - it put a spin on things, added flavor, made me laugh. Other times, I wished the heckler would just shut up so I could learn something.

I am for deporting all recent unattached illegals. I am for a local citizen panel to consider certification of those who have been here 25 years and have family and community and have been law-abiding and tax-paying.

This celebration here tells me that this work is not hopeless. I thank you for this teaching with all my heart and lift my glass to human solidarity, to the ultimate victory of knowledge, peace, good-will and understanding.

New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.