This Building of Good Bones (Old Main) by G. Louis Heath

This building has stood, a brick-faced sentinel

on this limestone bluff for over a century.

It is a building of good bones, bones that

have borne many classes and their profs.

These good bones shouldered each new

class with sturdy grace, rejoiced at successes,

cried over failures, and mourned untimely

deaths. Its rooms have known the good

bones of youth, bones that carried books,

laptops and who knows what in those

backpacks.

Those young bones have found their legs as

we never dreamed they could, so very well,

and walked to a golden dawn and beyond,

far beyond, to many lives well lived.

This building is proud of those lives whose bones

walked these halls and how it shaped them.

The tears it sheds now as its old bones give

out are tears of joy for the many young

bones that walked its halls and built strong

futures here.

  *My university will close in a few weeks, in May, 2016. I wrote this poem for that impending, historic occasion.  

G. Louis Heath, Ph.D., Berkeley, 1969, teaches at Ashford University, Clinton, Iowa.He retires in May, 2016. He enjoys reading his poems at open mics. He often hikes along the Mississippi River, stopping to work on a poem he pulls from his back pocket, weather permitting. He can be contacted at gheathorov@gmail.com