Professor Danielle Legros Georges has been teaching in the Creative Arts and Learning Division Since 2001. She penned the following inaugural poem for President Jeff Weiss, which she delivered during the ceremony on March 25.
A poem for Jeff Weiss's Lesley University Presidential Inauguration
A Call and Answer
Edith Lesley saw the world emerging around her and said yes
to the families in settlement houses with parents from Europe,
freshly made American as the 20th century turned into itself.
Yes, to the women who would teach women who would
teach children. Her fledgling seven students an earnest assembly,
Froebelian in the belief that learners are flowers to be watered,
their classrooms, sites of flurry and possibility. All around them:
the forces of water and of walls. The old world meeting the new.
All around us: the forces of walls and of water. To what will we
say yes? How to see the suns that we are, multihued and brilliant
in the Cambridge air: the security guard surveying the night
as it passes, the staffer early to open the day’s doors,
the cleaners, and the cooks of the cafeteria whose clinkings and scoldings
sustain us hungry for food, hungry for knowledge, blinking for more
sleep. We wake to a world we attempt to repair with our strivings
together. Here. How to see us fully: diligent at desks, standing
in labs and lecture halls, straining to capture the elegance of rain.
How to see us clearing earth for the first seeds of a difficult story,
on streets pushing to tilt more the earth’s axis with the words no justice,
no peace. With our deeds writing the world, thinking the world,
linking the world. How to notice the necessary, how to multiply
possibility. In a formal photograph Edith Lesley appears pensive,
her face, stoic and open, shooting a beam from the book in which
she sits-to this day, to this beginning, to the world and work ahead.
- Danielle Legros Georges