I walked into that room last week,
that room where first we talked,
first smiled,
a room where thousands of students
have since sat enthralled or bored
beneath professors’ voices,
a room where others too must have met,
some to love, to hate, or to grieve,
a few to rejoice and to endure.
Later, I walked beneath those massive columns
in the semi-courtyard where we strolled on our first date,
a first that verged on being a last
until under the columns a connection was made,
a connection that grew and faded for months
until finally flaring into decades of love.
And I walked by wood-sided Guild House,
stared through its windows,
remembered swearing beneath the stairway with you,
swearing our years to each other,
our parents behind us.
There, under the moon of Ann Arbor,
near the towering columns and the stairway of love,
I felt the breath of the sacred,
of the dawntime of together.
