for the 25th Reunion, June 15, 1954, of the Tufts-Jackson

Class of 1929, Tufts College)

Ten years after we were out, I thought back in a poem

To what it was like, who we'd been and would be. Looking back,

I drew a continental great sweep of a map, five colors,

And on that atlas of our lives, and life, I wrote:

The bells rang every hour from the tower in the trees

In the springtime every day. A bell said, Go. Bell,

And we went, from gym to Greek to chlorophyll. Bell.

To coffee at ten in the morning, Teele Square, and back

To the Bible, McCollester, or theoretical biology, Neal,

And met the girls we were in love with, after class.

And the girls who were in love with us danced, I see

Us swirled warm together at evening parties. A music,

A music to one another.

This is the way I remember it.

We were graduated in nineteen-twenty-nine, a year,

We were told at Commencement, great, or the greatest,

Opening out like a broad road up the map to anywhere.

Well, we know the map now. Twenty-five years of map,

The maybe scrawled, the maybe careful contours of life

We have made each for ourselves. The very public peaks

And the private erosions. At our age we know what we know.

We had children, or no children. Some of us died.

We're hardy, though, we're some people hard to get rid of.

Look, look around. The best that can happen to people

Has happened to us, and some of the worst. Not all

The worst; that never happens.

Life has happened to us.

And the bells still ring every hour from the tower,

Time moving hour along to the next hour, time, time,

By the year, by ten years, little by little more pay

And less hair, and we say, You haven't changed a bit!

Glad at the reunion, a pause in time. Twenty-five years.

We're history.

Think what we lived through, by the bell.

We were graduated into the depression, the lost generation

That was never lost. It was rough, but we never got lost.

That was a good time, the twenties. Ring that bell!

Novels are written now about the twenties, and the songs -

The best songs they find to play now were ours to dance to,

The lucky generation, not the lost, lanterns in the trees

On Class Day, noisy meals in the old fraternity houses,

And no newspapers. Our newspaper was the Tufts Weekly.

Ring that bell again, and loud for us!

We begot houses

And loves, we worked the big war. We found our way.

Always we had that map, and across it a bell clanging,

That old iron reminder. Now we have shelved ourselves.

There were lovers among us, love in us. Twenty-five

Years later it is love mostly that comes through into June

And covers all. Love. Pride. Companionship. Loyalty.

Those are well-worn words, but words that can't be worn out.

Those are words big enough to blow everything to pieces

If their power were forbidden.

It is merely our whole lives.

It is the best, desperate, richest, gay, only whole-of-heart

Way we can say how once the bells rang, how the bells ring now.

So look at us on the beach there, twenty-five years after,

Spelled out big in the sand, big as life, under the sun.

I like what I see, saying the names, faces. Faces and names.

Here we are, milling around, reminding ourselves of ourselves

At the alumni luncheon. Here we are, and here we are,

Happy on the terrace, drinking, or comparing our children,

Some of them here, too, image or modification of us.

Here we are, re-acquainted at dinner, a salad, a service,

A ritual partaking, a new breaking of bread in our house,

Revising our respect for one another, or our envy, or glad

Simply to be again with friends.

To remember one another.

And this is the best of all, the knowing what we've been through

And don't have to say. And don't say.

And the bells ring.