Ubi Sunt

Phyllis Zeisel

Where are the footsteps that once reechoed along narrow corridors patterned with light, through the thoughtful silence of the library?

Where are the feet that wore small hollows on the steps in Linden and Middle, that raced across the hockey field in the crisp days of Autumn?

Where are the voices, fresh and young like ours, singing in the court ‘Oh Rockford College’ and ‘Decus,’ reciting in class, laughing, and shouting in all these, our rooms?

Where are the faces, now solemn, now joyful, which, glimpsed through partly-opened doors, peopled the classrooms, and crowded into the chapel?

Where are the hands which one once labored with care on a dress, mixed paints on a palette, coaxed a tune from a piano?

Where are the girls, whose ghosts throng the gym, brush past you in dimly-lighted halls—unconscious influence on our lives and thoughts and hearts?

And where, in the years to come, are the students who someday, will ask the same of us?

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From: Rockford Review, Volume XXXVI, June 1947, p. 21. Transcription and edition by Daisy Melesio, a student at Rockford University.