This poem by a Trinity alumnus was submitted in connection with an article on Hugh Ogden, late professor of English and poet, in the fall 2007 Reporter.

On the Death and Life of the Poet Teacher, Hugh Ogden
By Glenn Gamber ’70

Space unseen through a glowing screen
delivered the message of your death,
its abruptness igniting an impulse
in so many to reach back
in time, just slightly,
to try to alter the completed event,
crying out, “Wait, not today!” 
Surely the winter weather will turn colder
soon, freezing the lake thick and hard again
bringing nature back into its proper
alignment to sustain you as it always has.

But time as we know it grinds only forward
so now the train click-clacks northward
toward where you lived, on a hill road 
still abundant with tree friends. 
Outpacing the speeding cars
on the parallel highway, we course
through the long established track path
that slices through the mosaic of cities and towns
of countless of the ones you called two-leggeds,
who over centuries cleared the land
of so many of your beloved trees
to accommodate ever growing communities
whose best parts can be seen in the distance,
but which along the track bed
perspire their spent rusted vehicles
and other exhausted artifacts,
too infrequently pausing to fully wipe their brows. 
Here, away from the tended trees,
ragged yet strong survivor trees
rise singly or in clumps
from interspersed clearings and mounds,
as they would have long ago in undisturbed forests,
triumphant over the ebbs and flows of nature
rather than civilization’s steady small incursions.

Words by you, about you, pictures of you
nestle in the palms of the many of your saplings
now grown to degrees of maturity,
assembled, sad, but through your dark intense eyes
and easy smile remembering the joy.  In the fullness
of their lives, one after the other, some speak your words,
and your spirit, sprinkled in pieces among your many encounters
distant and near, assembles again, almost completely. 
One picture jars a little.  Young, running, straining,
you are within a moment of winning.  One feels sharply
the distance you have covered, we all cover. 

On your last day, in your last mortal hour,
you clamp on the skis that have always
carried you safely from your island retreat
to the shore and you set out, properly leaning forward, 
mimicking that young runner lunging, seeking still. 
In an instant, the earth,
as if gasping suddenly in a fitful sleep,
swallows you back into nature’s eternity
casting to material fickleness your words now echoing
in the large room where they are read lovingly as we take comfort
in knowing that you will live on forever, for now.