Today at a good-bye luncheon featuring Colorado University’s outgoing and hugely effective president Bruce Benson, someone gave me an acrostic. This person asked for LOVE HELP PEOPLE and works developing gifts that fund medical research, in the medical part of CU.
Love tells me “help;” it’s my heart’s raison d’etre.
Of all the works there are, mine satisfies
Voracious yearnings, needs that are unmet
Except for raising research to the skies.
How great it is to round up gentle gifts
Expressing laymen’s love for C U growth.
Link donors’ legacies to science: lifts,
Provides the linker with a bit of both.
Partaking in the mission of C U
Enables me to help, with grace and style.
Of course, gifts are the Heavy Lifting; new
Potential partners are my “run the mile.”
Let all be said and done, I love this place –
Extended open hands fill mine with grace.
Forced, and in places corny, but the person I wrote it for was an English Major in college, so knew what a sonnet was! Grinning.
But wait, there’s more! Latest round of Ordowahl, book one, has the title “Ordowahl, Manhood” and here’s the first new sonnet, that bridges chapters 1 and 2. No longer do the sonnets recap – too easy. Now they ask leading questions, e.g. “So that’s what that meant, – what omen does hit hold, portend, present?”
Becoming man shreds childhood’s safety. Death
will trouble Ordo should he linger. Life
lies elsewhere. Kinfolk help him catch his breath
while he wends wayward, shuns both realm and knife.
Did Dad say Ordo is his Solomon?
How does that doom the best he’s bred to flee?
What planning did he fail, what unbegun
precautions, outcomes did he not foresee?
Unblessed, alone, Prince Ordowahl sets out
to make the wider world his home. So much
to learn, so innocent, naive, devout –
arms wide to fate and GOD’s protective touch.
Let’s guess that on his way he wanders south;
Cross mountain? Chase a stream to sea, its mouth?
Oh, and Another Thing 