pomona supplemental "essay"
Prompt: Although it may appear to the contrary, we do know that people have a life beyond what they do to get into college. Tell us about an experience you’ve had outside of your formal classroom and extracurricular activities that was just plain fun.
One AM.
The sun burns hot in Iowa in late July,
but the cold night air doesn’t seem to remember.
The asphalt of the road echoes a whisper of the blazing heat;
I press against it to hear with my whole body.
The cornstalks that edge the road signify fertility, a cornucopia,
a feast of sorts but it’s not a tangible thing for which I’m giving thanks.
This is a spiritual absolving.
Ten days of fifty Unitarian Universalist youth struggling, crying, learning,
working towards social justice for the beloved community.
This, our connecting struggle: the power of love in the face of oppression.
We’re deconstructing society and building up a fortress of compassion
in a world where hate is still behind the steering wheel.
No cars, no houses, no buildings, no light.
No distractions.
It’s dark dark dark and the purity sings,
resonates in some cavity inside of me
like a pure-tone piece of music with perfect overtones.
“Look.”
I never knew that without hills, without buildings,
in a state full of cornfields, that the sky commands so much
space.
The stars hum with light energy through the crystal clear air,
dizzying and vivid in the vast inky expanse.
He wrote me letters over the year, muffled midnight phone calls and
a postcard from Greece professing his love for history and mythos;
the tie that binds us was forged through abstract, poetic exchanges.
He quotes to me: “Be
the change you wish to see in the world.”
His mind the disorganized desk of a genius, cluttered with kinematic equations and
snippets of Plato’s Republic and starry outlines,
he sketches constellations for me in the sky, weaving stories through the stars;
in and out and in and out, the fabric transient and flowing.
“Look.”
I lose the outline of Cassiopeia in the midst of the carbon stretch;
He takes my pointing hand and traces
down, up, down, up,
connect-the-dots on a larger scale-
We’ve grown since childhood, after all.
“This song!” reverberates through my body and we dance,
a private sort of waltz with my ear to his chest to the ONEtwothree ONEtwothree
of our heartbeats.
We dance until I think I could float away with unbearable lightness,
the moment never precedented, never repeated;
The unbearable lightness of knowing history will not remember this dance.
My eyes to the sky, my feet on the ground,
my heart singing out in gladness knowing that
I will be the one to remember, to chronicle and surely
under the stars, we are not alone.
One AM.
The sun burns hot in Iowa in late July,
but the cold night air doesn’t seem to remember.
The asphalt of the road echoes a whisper of the blazing heat;
I press against it to hear with my whole body.
The cornstalks that edge the road signify fertility, a cornucopia,
a feast of sorts but it’s not a tangible thing for which I’m giving thanks.
This is a spiritual absolving.
Ten days of fifty Unitarian Universalist youth struggling, crying, learning,
working towards social justice for the beloved community.
This, our connecting struggle: the power of love in the face of oppression.
We’re deconstructing society and building up a fortress of compassion
in a world where hate is still behind the steering wheel.
No cars, no houses, no buildings, no light.
No distractions.
It’s dark dark dark and the purity sings,
resonates in some cavity inside of me
like a pure-tone piece of music with perfect overtones.
“Look.”
I never knew that without hills, without buildings,
in a state full of cornfields, that the sky commands so much
space.
The stars hum with light energy through the crystal clear air,
dizzying and vivid in the vast inky expanse.
He wrote me letters over the year, muffled midnight phone calls and
a postcard from Greece professing his love for history and mythos;
the tie that binds us was forged through abstract, poetic exchanges.
He quotes to me: “Be
the change you wish to see in the world.”
His mind the disorganized desk of a genius, cluttered with kinematic equations and
snippets of Plato’s Republic and starry outlines,
he sketches constellations for me in the sky, weaving stories through the stars;
in and out and in and out, the fabric transient and flowing.
“Look.”
I lose the outline of Cassiopeia in the midst of the carbon stretch;
He takes my pointing hand and traces
down, up, down, up,
connect-the-dots on a larger scale-
We’ve grown since childhood, after all.
“This song!” reverberates through my body and we dance,
a private sort of waltz with my ear to his chest to the ONEtwothree ONEtwothree
of our heartbeats.
We dance until I think I could float away with unbearable lightness,
the moment never precedented, never repeated;
The unbearable lightness of knowing history will not remember this dance.
My eyes to the sky, my feet on the ground,
my heart singing out in gladness knowing that
I will be the one to remember, to chronicle and surely
under the stars, we are not alone.