The Dream of a Prophet and the Last Football Game
In those summers, evenings sometimes,
I went down by there and looked from across the avenue.
The dark hulk of the building stood over there waiting for me,
But I didn't go in, I suppose,
Because I knew I would see only strangers there.
From outside through the trees I could see
Soft golden light glimmer from some of the windows.
Occasionally a broken shadow fell across a pane,
Causing a rift of light among the leaves outside.
Now and then students with books in their hands
Crossed the damp grass to the sidewalk,
Disappearing into the cavernous darkness between buildings.
Inside in the cellar darkness I could imagine
Some old rat slipping along the floor of the "lower locker dungeon,"
Stopping to investigate a note crumpled in front of locker 192,
While ever-alert for footsteps and running feet.
Despite some outside intrusions of music pounding from cars passing by,
And the lingering sounds of Webb's many choruses I can still hear,
It was probably very quiet and hushed in there.
High up on the sharp-spired roof,
A wind suddenly ducked laughing through the trees,
Leaving them roaring in anger.
The wind curled around the dark tower of the bell,
Empty then,
Like the first night that it towered over the small community in 1892,
Built from the promptings of a prophet in a dream.
The frame was the deep-ribbed hull of a landlocked ship,
Soon three stories high, and growing more each day.
The face was as if carved from an Aswan cliffside by an exacting wind.
Rooms within were furnished with the skill of calloused hands,
And the touch of generations of teachers yet to come.
Mighty mountains lifted a towering guard,
Their tops encrusted with glacial snow,
Their feet surrounded by patchwork fields,
All setting emblems around these temples building far below.
The unfinished bounds
Stretched from the never-ending reach of a teacher's mind
To the never-ending reach of every student's eternal curiousity.
The newer generations contended it was shaky;
The older began to say it had character.
Peopled with people.
The Prophet Joseph's word: Futurity.
But, after the future wears itself out,
Some would bind it all together with a big rope,
Find new homes for the birds somewhere,
And move the whole thing into the back of a warehouse to molder.
Hollow and old now, they declared.
They were wrong, of course.
It still lies fully in the course of Brigham Young's dreams.
And there fragrant colored leaves
Still fall sadly to the grasses at the end of each autumn,
Fully expecting to be torn to pieces in the last football game.
-- Larry Christensen, '66
