Alouette at Eighteen (1978)

I wrote this poem for the eighteenth birthday of my second college girlfriend, Alouette Kluge (1960-2022). She would become Alouette Melton. I wrote about her in 2000 in my essay A Message for Alouette. At the time, I was in my fourth year of college in Chicago, she in her senior year of high school in Princeton, New Jersey.

Alouette at Eighteen

Youthful as the New World nation

Hungry for the life frontiered before her,

Gil’ess ‘spite sophistication,

Paragon of promise; I adore her.

Child of Query, robed in Reason,

Beauty twinned and tendered by her wisdom,

Toppler of tradition’s follies,

Here’tic slipped of yoke of hers- and hisdom.

When doubt enshrouds immoral Truths,

Shots jellied lifeblood surging to her head,

Like Titan striding mountain peaks

She vaults taboo, unshrines the hallowed dead;

Eclipses sons of Greece and Rome,

Frights Buckley, Rand, and Hegel into hiding;

Paints Truth as ’tis, routs mystics home,

Stands certain while savants are undeciding.

If fate plays mischief, cleaves our futures,

Strands the one without the other’s joy,

We’ll Spartans play, we’ll seize the day,

Lest cumbrous grief our later loves alloy.

When Massachusetts woos, she sallies,

Thirsting to imbibe its cultured airs:

John Harvard, Adams, Kennedy

And Rawls invite her faculties to theirs.

May life seduce her, goodness warm her,

Genius bless her with its company;

She’ll shower love on Harvard Square,

Enfertl’ling Cambridge as she dazzles me.