Sincerely, Us

Poetry from Washburn students and faculty

Grown

A small seed sits surrounded in the soil, and any time I look at it, it appears no different than it had only moments ago, but between then and now it has been growing.

Then one day I look and see not a seed, but a plant, with leaves green and bright and roots stronger than steel. I wonder how I could have missed such a change.

Reflections

Her emerald eyes sparkle like my own, Her copper hair lit gold in morning's light. I only crave to know her and be known; But her presence is as fleeting as the night.

I look on her left, and see the same. I note his quiet smirk, his messed-up hair, His twinkling eyes behind those silver frames; My desperate longing is past repair.

This list of symbols is the most I’ll know: A lily, grown up beautiful in the ashes; A stag with head held high amid life’s blows; Two sets of dates, two dashes.

This is my beginning—a seed— relying on grown hands to feed me and on the light to show me the way. I grow toward that light and those hands because they are all I know.

But there comes a time when my eyes open and I begin to see my own way. My roots become legs so that I may follow it, my leaves now grasping hands so that I may reach.

Where that reach will take me, I cannot be sure, but uncertainty will not stop me from growing. And one day, I will look upon myself and see that I am not as I once was.

Threshold

A tip of the hat as I stride

Across the threshold between worlds, The secrets of who I have been And who I will become Written in the books at my side.

Goodbye to the carefree, The safety of the known. I welcome today a new path Through the un-knowing, Toward my deeper self, And my place in a wider world.

Charles Anthony Silvestri

Lecturer of history

To find a place

A sea of seething humanity, writhing, choking, all about me. With weary mind I acknowledged the dim insanity of trying to find places for them all, trying to find boxes for each of them to fill, trying to identify, like jars labeled in a lab, the names that they might answer to, the questions I could ask, to make them understand me, and accept me as a part of this new reality, this vague, impressionistic art.

Until I looked for meaning in a blurry mass of faces— until I sought a place to plant my flag and sing my anthem, I never knew the skin I lived in, felt the pulsing rhythm of throbbing personality within, that would not countenance a schism from my existence as a body, solid in real space, to become a floating affectation, a being without a face.

Shakespeare said it best, his meaning cannot be confused. Defining personal esteem, he wrote: “To thine own self be true”. Does this endorse dense isolation, out of sight and sound? Or the courage to preserve a sense of oneness in a crowd, a spirit unashamed to speak blunt individuality out loud.

Maria Tardiff

Editor’s Note: Student Media welcomes work from students across campus. If you would like your original poetry placed in the next issue of Indigo Magazine, drop by the Student Media office and speak to one of our leaders or email studentmedia@washburn.edu.