At your graduation party
you engage in effortless conversation
with friends, professors, Miss Bunny, the housemother,
circling back to check on your awkward parents.

It is fun watching you grow
from the 10-year old unable to turn down a dance
to the tall gentleman loved by everybody,
including other mothers, for your solicitude and friendship.

The boy who drew comics of good and evil twins,
you cast yourself as the popular devil character
in last semester’s morality play.
You tame Vinnie, the newest of our three cats.

You sing “Your Man” backed by 15 a cappella singers.
You compose the sesquicentennial stanza
of your school hymn in trochaic tetrameter, the last words
shared with classmates before processing from the chapel.

You snag a job in the library,
find the first few days of working 8 – 5 “exhilirating,”
earn a scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference,
and still beat both parents in a mean game of Scrabble.

You favor a bow tie and wear topsiders,
send your dad a T-shirt to “buff up” his summer,
find one of my poems “touching,”
give a firm handshake and a lingering hug.

I can’t wait to see what you do next.