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"On the Inauguration of Transylvania's Twenty-fifth President" Richard Taylor
What lies beyond does not duplicate the past - the acts, the words, the regimental flags and willow work that sketch at best a semblance of our former selves. Instead, here, we reclaim what we can, the gist of who we were, landmarks on the map of our shared journey, the rivers into which our own rivulets and branches feed. Here the waters gather as a single stream whose current holds the sum of our accumulated past - a richness whose legacy is our future, a stream where lives are not so much steered as readied to venture and extend. So we enter into sunlight to estimate the past and shape what lies ahead, not as we color it in myth or fiction, not to worship, but simply to know it as it was so much as we can know it, and in knowing offer clues to who we were, we are, we will be.
Richard Taylor is the Kenan Visiting Writer at Transylvania and Former Poet Laureate of Kentucky. |