Ted Kooser is currently our poet laureate. I like this poem very much; it reminds me both of myself twenty years ago and of more than a few of my students today.
Student
The green shell of his backpack makes him lean
into wave after wave of responsibility,
and he swings his stiff arms and cupped hands,
paddling ahead. He has extended his neck
to its full length, and his chin, hard as a beak
breaks the cold surf. He’s got his baseball cap on
backward as up he crawls, out of the froth
of a hangover and onto the sand of the future,
and lumbers, heavy with hope, into the library.
Surely anyone who survived college and grad school knows what it is to live the concluding lines! (And I always wore my baseball caps backwards in those days; thankfully, I’ve outgrown that.)
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