Wesleyan College

"When I was your age, I wrote a weekly column for the campus newspaper entitled Caustic Cogitations, an irreverent look at issues on the Wesleyan College campus.  After one particularly critical piece, a faculty member, using a line from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, scolded me.  In my later years, she wrote that I would regret 'my salad days when I was green in judgment.' 

I stand here today to tell you that I do not regret my green-growing days, for, like Federico Garcia Lorca, I would declare, as he sang in his Romance Sonambulo, "Verde, que te quiero verde."  Or, to quote my own lines from the poem I have written for you: 'Forty years later I've come back/to say, simply, always be ready to welcome/the green, all that's verde within you./Have the courage of your corazon,/have esperanza,/a little French insouciance.../That green wind I wanted/to follow is right here/today, on the thirteenth of May,/so cup it awhile in your fingers/ and listen: your voice/the breath of it lifting its brave cancion."