September 27, 2019
An original poem by Lauren Robel for the celebration of IU's Bicentennial.
Greetings from the home of Simon-Skjodt Assembly Hall, IU Auditorium, and the Arboretum; from
Big Ten sports and “Breaking Away” and Big Red Supercomputers;
from Crest toothpaste and the Old Crescent.
Greetings from Drosophila and DNA;
from the Eskenazi Museum, the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design,
and Ernie Pyle.
Greetings from the home of Shakespeare’s First Folios;
the Guttenberg Bible, the Grunwald Gallery, and the Gables.
Greetings from the Hamilton-Lugar School of Global and International
Studies,
the Hutton Honors College and Hoagy Carmichael;
from Luddy’s Informatics, Computing, and Intelligent Systems Engineering
and the Indiana Daily Student.
Greetings from the Jacobs School of Music and the Jordan River;
and from the Kelley School of Business.
Greetings from the land of Limestone and Laureates, like Lin Ostrom;
and Little 500.
Greetings from the Maurer School of Law, the Media School,
the Indiana Memorial Union,
and Memorial Stadium.
Greetings from the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center
and Marcellus Neal and Francis Marshall.
Greetings from the home of Opera, the O’Neill School, and Olympians;
from Poets and Protests;
from Psychological and Brain Sciences; from Public Health;
from Quantum Computing, and from Rhodes, Marshall, and Fulbright Scholars.
Sweet greetings from Showalter Fountain, Soul Revue,
Singing Hoosiers and Sample Gates.
Greetings in every world language from the world’s best Title Six centers and national language resource centers;
and from Uralic and Altaic studies.
Soaring and far-sighted greetings from Voice, Violins, Violas, and Vision science.
Greetings from the Wells Scholars, the Wells Library,
and Herman B himself.
Greetings from extraordinary arts and cutting-edge science.
Exuberant greetings from the legacy of Jerry Yeagley and world-class soccer.
And change-the-world greetings from Zoology,
the home of Alfred Kinsey’s gall wasp research
and much, much more.
From A to Z, from students and alumni from every inhabited continent and every single county in the state of Indiana;
From my alma mater:
Greetings from big, bold, brilliant, bounteous, and beautiful IU Bloomington.