04 October 2009

sonnet 74

if everybody in the balcony
is texting, reading, doing sudoku,
what is this program meant to do for me?
it might have been intended more for you:
the folks on stage who speak in microphones
and want to think they make some difference.
each of us hundreds sitting here alone
might, if we paid attention, make some sense
of all the things you try to make us learn.
the front row only might have heads all raised,
in hopes that their attentiveness might earn,
from some adjacent dean, redundant praise.
oh, colleague turns to colleague, smugly grins--
the letters you have earned by ego's sins!

10/2/2009

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe it's meant to give you fodder for writing? ;-)
I agree, though. The (implied) significance of the event is lost in the crowd, among all the self-congratulatory back-patting.

Aurora Borealis_23 said...

:P