To A High School Senior by Pat Schneider
Don't go. Don't stay.
Daughter. Morning after afternoon
the last year slips away.
Singing all the old songs, you will go
(ambivalence of moon, certainty of sun)
we know
only half of what we are.
The earth is earth to us, star
perhaps
if apprehended far enough away.
Daughter – don't go.
Don't stay.
How many parents of high school senior daughters have I talked to, encouraged, commiserated with when it was time for their daughters to move away, to start that new chapter of their lives, to soar with the rooted wings? Without ever having had the dilemma of saying "Don't go. Don't stay," my words should have rung false for all of them. When I said, "Don't go. Please stay. You must stay. You can't go" to my daughter, it was a fruitless plea. I do understand on some levels the dilemma Pat Schneider lays out in the poem. Oh, yes. But I have wished now for 13 years to be able to voice that dilemma, so simple, so transitional, so cusp-like. I just never got to the cusp. A car crash wiped out the choice, and replaced it with a soul-wrenching lament instead.