Quote for the Week

Doors
by Hermann Hagedorn

Like a young child who to his mother's door
Runs eager for the welcoming embrace,
And finds the door shut, and with troubled face
Calls, and through sobbing calls, and o'er and o'er
Calling, storms at the panel--so before
A door that will not open, sick and numb,
I listen for a word that will not come.
And know at last, I may not enter more.

Silence! And through the silence and the dark
By that closed door, the distant sob of tears
Beats on my spirit, as on fairy shores
The spectral sea, and through the sobbing--hark!
Down the fair chanbered corridor of years,
The quiet shutting, one by one, of doors.

When I was in college, I took a course in interpretative speech and the professor had each student read this poem aloud. He said, "You won't understand it now, but as you grow older, you will." I do.