I celebrate youth,
the youth in my students,
the unspent youth in myself.

As a boy, I ran free
leaping fences, dodging trains,
roughhoused with friends,
every bruise an honor earned,
running naked in the summer rain,
stripped down to what makes us all the same.
O those disapproving eyes!

I lost teeth, broke bones,
came crying home.
It still aches where I took stitches.
I never felt more alive.

Later came the greater danger
of what Thoreau called
quiet desperation.
I escaped through the raucous play
of words and their meanings,
ideas that put me at risk of ridicule.

Yet I am willing to believe
the equality of all that lives
is not merely the idea
of a boy at play,
but a risk still worth taking.