A bright-winged self undone beneath its chosen sky—

The world splitting along its rugged structures. 

Memory loosens, its bright ligatures undone,

Until the once-coherent self diffuses into semblance,

A figure glimpsed only in the wake of its own vanishing.

We hover in that narrow vestibule of consequence,

Where childhood persists as a receding warmth in the walls

And the unfeatured future gathers at the threshold.

To cross is not ascent but relinquishment— 

To feel the known self yielding beneath the weight of possible lives.

Recognition arrives with the restraint of light through fracture

The astonishment of having survived our own revision.

We stand among the remnants of former certainties.

Let us inherit ourselves anew, learning at last

To endure the question of who we are becoming. 

And so, to you—tremulous, incandescent at the lip of metamorphosis,

Poised on the threshold between invocation and echo,

Stand, for a moment, at the edge of what is yours to begin—

Godspeed, 

Graduate.