A poem for the WFU Class of 2021: “Closing Remarks” (after a pandemonium)

Wanda Balzano, founding chair and associate professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, wrote an occasional poem dedicated to the Wake Forest University Class of 2021. The University honored graduates with a series of small diploma ceremonies in the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum and an historic commencement celebration at Truist Field on Sunday, May 16, 2021.

Visit the Experience 2021 Commencement site to view photos, videos, speeches and performances from commencement weekend.

Last year, Balzano wrote and dedicated a poem to Wake Forest University students who finished the spring 2020 semester remotely amid the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic’s spread in the U.S.

“Closing Remarks” (after a pandemonium)

For the WFU Class of 2021

How will the curtain drop?
Will the crucible be covered, and the shutters closed?
Will the bottle be corked, the wine undrunk?
You have arrived now at the end where you began

These four years of your breath
These four years of thinking
These four years of learning

Away from home,
You translated hope into action, your dreams
Carved into stepping stones of new dawns.

The hands that accompanied your walk
Will let you go, now–
And you are leaving, in a group and alone,
With a promise being fulfilled.

Behind you, the deluge of history
Without atonement.
Like sweet sailor Deucalion and
Pyrrha the flame-colored one,

Your head slanted above your shoulders
Stepping out of the gray twilight into the tints of
the bright beacon of tomorrow,

And your arms arched high into a spur
You sow back into the trenches and the trails
Pebbles of your wisdom.

With foot after foot falling forward,
You leave a mark, unclosed, on the damp earth
To unseal and heal the bones of your mother
So dear.