On April 10, 2025 Del Mar College officially reopened the William F. White Jr. Library. I was asked to write and the present a poem at the event. I worked there for 26 years before retiring 2 years before. What follows is that poem.
All Aboard!
for the Reopening of the William F. White, Jr. Library,
Del Mar College, Corpus Christi, Texas
For us to partake in the near miracle
of my writing down some letters or for you
to understand the words which they form,
neither one of us needed to invent
a language or an alphabet from scratch.
What makes us humans so different
from our cousins the apes is the knack
of transmitting gained knowledge from one
generation to the next, then to the next
and on and on; from paintings on cave walls
to photos of galaxies from space telescopes.
Today we gather to celebrate a building
which is both a machine in and monument to
this most human of endeavors, but I ask
you to remember that steamboats and starships
go nowhere without their crews and are pointless
without passengers to take along for the journey.
No matter the message, if left to itself, even if
said missives are aligned neatly in assigned spaces,
they are meaningless artifacts in which Helen preens
idly in Sparta and a thousand ships remain moored,
Don Quixote lets windmills spin in peace, Tom and Huck
sleep like angels, and the devil leaves Faust untempted,
for nothing can happen until a reader turns a page,
or clicks on a link, swipes left or right and engages
in the task of bringing the past forward, all the while
exploring new and unmarked paths to distant futures
