What Is Beautiful and Important
Dobbs Ferry High School, Dobbs Ferry, NY
I am thinking of my public high school. New Deal,
constructed in the 1930’s, PWA funded: stonework
and marble, local red bricks and Academic Gothic,
circular cast-iron stairs leading up to a cozy room
behind its tower clock, where kids who ran the
literary magazine met. Windows of leaded glass, the
whole Hudson River if you looked through the ones
in the oak-paneled library. All those blues and browns
and silvers even God can barely track: the whole
Hudson River, an open-handed gift! And beside it,
my castle-of-a-school’s constant dialogue with the back-
and-forth tides, always ending in So we agree. We all
have the right to know in this village, in this country.
And: Everyone deserves at least this. Everyone’s
stone floors, polished nightly in long, moonlit halls.
Everyone’s laughter and buzz as we piled into
homeroom the next day, every day! And over each
water fountain a wide-eyed mosaic owl created when
there was no money to spare. All so I might hold
a book in my hand and know what is beautiful and
important. So I can remember: this was given to me.