CLASS NOTES

Aloha, Oy Vey, Aye Bobo, and Howdy!
Last time I wrote to the class as a whole
was for our 50th reunion book,
but I never got a copy.
Maybe there was some right-wing sabotage.
Maybe the post office was being set up to fail.
Maybe it was just a run-of-the-mill SNAFU.

Now our class moves ever closer to the front
of the alumni magazine, ever more into
the obituaries.
I almost made it :
Anaplasmosis,
fractured cervical vertebae,
rock star neurosurgeon,
whole book loads of nurses,
the stuff of legends,
one whose name means
"RISE UP" in Hebrew.

My rehab goes well, although
I still list a bit to port.
My left foot still drags
now and again.
Common names escape me,
but I delight still in what I read,
like after lights out in the women's lock-up
in Greenwich Village when a sister calls,
"Hey, Angela! What's imperialism?"

Since my fall, A.I. has metastasized.
Still quite fallible,
it says my friend died
two years ago.
Wrong.
It rightly says I misremember
what professor Davis actually wrote.
The correct copy is,
"Angela, what does 'imperialism' mean?"
"Lock-up" in the House of Detention,
not "Lights out." Same thing. Approximately.
Angela provides the right answer,
good teacher that she is.

What I remembered was more dramatic,
more cinematic, and where but in books
can one be a political prisoner with
Toni Morrison as editor, no less?
How great is that?
A happy Hollywood ending too.
She goes free as a spirit.

Bruce Williams
Class of 1970

The Midcoast Villager
Poem of the Week
January 22, 2026

As a student in the 1960s, I followed the Free Speech Movement
and admired Angela Davis at UCLA for standing up to the
reactionary governor of California Ronald Reagan.