Readers,
Indulge us, in our old age, with our minds tired by twenty-two issues this year, by reading this very long prose poem.
Old hats and fresh fedoras, fried eggs and fresh-laid, wilting flowers and little spoutlings: welcome to The Yale Herald! I once turned down an offer to go see Pippin because I wanted to watch a Houston Rockets game on a hotel TV. Recently I was told by the narrator of a book that “pious harpooners never make good voyagers—it takes the shark out of ‘em,” and I imagined a great white or tiger shark floating out from a praying harpooner’s body like a cartoon soul after death, and shaking its big shark head at their past host, and while I understand sharks here are being used metaphorically to mean being all dogged and mean in one’s whaling habits, I cannot prevent my mind from imaging worlds far greater than those which currently exist. I was given this scenario to consider: “You’re cooking salmon, but you don’t have an oven. Figure it out.” And Cod said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. It’s the half-way point in the semester. Are you scared yet? I awoke this morning with a pit in my stomach left over from last year. Have you ever tried playing bocce in a leaf pile? “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” In January 2011, the editor-in-chief of this publication began her first Letter from the Editors by writing, “Welcome to the future!” In a week, Sam Darnold’s Seattle Seahawks and Drake Maye’s New England Patriots will play in the National Football League’s sixtieth Super Bowl. We tried to go to a strip club. No one is talking about sandbars anymore. And just like that, we’re 40. I was walking through Madison, Connecticut, on Wednesday evening and heard a house finch singing. You ever get bored enough over a school break that you stand in your kitchen and stare out the window and thwack the blunt end of an EpiPen Trainer into your thigh over and over, just to feel something? The end is nigh. This week, we saw a lone wild turkey standing on top of a wooden fence in a wooded area close to a parking lot.
What a year. Clearly, we’re not serious people. Or at least not self-serious people. But from sandbars to the Super Bowl, from fish to tadpoles, from bocce balls to EpiPens, we try to take pride in the little things. Anything can be a metaphor for what we do here at the Herald. There’s a poetic sparkle in everything, so think of every Herald like a collection of William Carlos Williams poems. “They were delicious / so sweet / and so cold,” he says about the plums in the icebox.
This is where we leave you. We hope we’ve done you well. We hope that, whenever you reached into this little icebox of ours, that you found our little plums of poems and essays and stories cold and sweet and delicious. We hope you were moved by what you read. And that you keep reading, next year.
Most daringly,
Will and Oscar
