Middle School Band Concert
by Christine Rhein

Their uniforms—starched white shirts,
      black bow ties, cummerbunds—
         shine on a stage with chairs and stands

crammed close, young bodies merged
      into one great whole, while the tall girl,
         standing in back, waits, waits

to deliver a crash of her cymbals,
      their timbre meant to rouse
         like the march being played,

the baton insisting along with the push
      and pull of the teacher's palm,
         melody secondary to precision,

proof of lessons learned, the gleaming
      slides of the trombones synchronized,
         unlike the drums that pound within,

or the rumble of applause as parents, unable
      to hear their child's isolated notes, rise,
         eager to say Good job! or Next time,

sit up straighter!, knowing tomorrow,
      when the students watch their performance
         on video, the teacher will grade

their rhythm, their emotion, reminding
      them about medals they can pin above
         their hearts if everyone's music

starts and stops at exactly the same time.
      And now, as they exit, the backs
         of their heads are dark and dreadful

like the whispers resuming in the lobby
      about the 7th—grader who hanged himself
         at home over the weekend.

Christine Rhein, “Middle School Band Concert” from Wild Flight. Copyright © 2008 by Christine Rhein. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Texas Tech University Press, ttupress.org. (buy now)

It was on this day in 1636 that Harvard University was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just 16 years after the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth.

It's the birthday of British satirist Evelyn Waugh (books by this author), born in London (1903). He came from a literary family: His father was the managing editor of an important British publishing house and his older brother was a distinguished writer. But Waugh didn't do well in school and he left Oxford without receiving a degree. He tried working as a teacher but he got fired from three schools in two years. He said, "I was from the first an obvious dud." He was seriously in debt, without a job, and had just been rejected by the girl he liked, so he decided to drown himself in the ocean. He wrote a suicide note and jumped in the sea, but before he got very far he was stung by a jellyfish. He scrambled back to shore, tore up his suicide note, and decided to give life a second chance.

He didn't know what else to do so he wrote a novel about a young teacher at a private school where the other teachers are all drunks, child molesters, and escaped convicts; and the mother of one student is running an international prostitution ring. His publishers forced him to preface the book with a disclaimer that said, "Please bear in mind throughout that it is meant to be funny." The novel, Decline and Fall, was published in 1928, and it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modern satire.

It's the birthday of poet John Hollander (books by this author), born in New York City (1929). He originally wanted to be a humor writer, and he's known for the quirky themes he chooses for his poetry collections. His book Reflections on Espionage: The Question of Cupcake (1976) is a long poem about a master spy who transmits coded messages to other secret agents. His collection Types of Shape (1968) is a series of poems that are arranged on the page so that the words form pictures of things, like a key, a cup, or a swan reflected in water. His 13th collection of poems was Powers of Thirteen (1983) which is broken up into thirteen sections of 13 poems. Each poem has 13 lines and each line has 13 syllables.

It's the birthday of John Hewitt (books by this author), born in Belfast (1907) to a Methodist family. Born the same year as Louis MacNeice, he was one of the most important Irish poets from a generation that followed W.B. Yeats's and preceded Seamus Heaney's. He directed an art gallery for most of his adult life and it wasn't until he retired and was in his mid-60s that he became an intensely productive poet.

He was a peace activist, a socialist, a dissenter, and a romantic lyricist. He was particularly interested in exploring Ulster (Northern Irish) identity, in finding threads that were common to Catholics and Protestants, Scottish, English, and Irish, by virtue of their shared region: the six counties that make up the northern part of the island of Ireland. He said that "regionalism is based on the conviction that as man is a social being, he must, now that the nation has become an enormously complicated organisation, find some smaller unit to which to give his loyalty."

His poetry collections include Conacre (1943), The Day of the Corncrake: Poems of the Nine Glens (1969), The Rain Dance (1978), and Loose Ends (1983). There's a pub named after him in Belfast and it's run by the Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre which Hewitt founded.

It was on this day in 1886 that the Statue of Liberty was officially unveiled and opened to the public. It was a gift from France intended to celebrate the two countries' shared love of freedom, shipped to the U.S. in pieces packed into 214 crates. Workers put it back together in New York. The day of the dedication was cold and rainy, but huge crowds came out for the celebration anyway. The statue was under veil and the sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi was alone in the statue's crown, waiting for the signal to drop the veil. A boy down below was supposed to wave a white handkerchief at the end of the big speech. The boy accidentally waved his handkerchief before the speech was over and Bartholdi let the curtain drop, revealing the huge bronze lady, and gunshots rang out from all the ships in the harbor. The speaker, who had been boring everybody, just sat down.

It's the birthday of the man who developed the polio vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk, born in New York City (1914) who developed a polio vaccine at the height of a polio epidemic in the mid-1950s, when parents were so worried about their children that they kept them home from swimming pools in the summer. Salk's discovery was that a vaccine could be developed from a dead virus, and he tested the vaccine on himself, his family, and the staff of his laboratory to prove it was safe. The vaccine was finally released to the public in 1955 and the number of people infected by polio went down from more than 10,000 a year to less than 100. Salk was declared a national hero.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

^