‘Another Beautiful Day in Miami’ with poet Campbell McGrath

FIU’s Campbell McGrath, Philip & Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing and MacArthur “genius,” wrote a poem commemorating the installation of Mark B. Rosenberg as president at FIU.

McGrath had this to say about “Another Beautiful Day in Miami”:

“Reflecting on the history of South Florida, the city of Miami, and of FIU, ‘Another Beautiful Day in Miami’ was inspired in part by President Rosenberg’s remark that universities are ‘institutions of memory and hope.’ Memory points us towards the past, while hope directs our attention to the future — meanwhile we are stuck in the present, navigating our lives from freeway to food court. This poem tries to capture some of the joy and irony of that dilemma.”

The official text of McGrath’s poem is below. To hear him read it at the installation ceremony, click below.

Another Beautiful Day in Miami

By Campbell McGrath

It is another beautiful day in Miami, and as I browse the cacophonous food court at the university I am given cause to consider those original South Floridians, the Tequesta, the Ais, the mighty Calusa,

and young Fernando d’Escalate Fontaneda, a Spanish sailor shipwrecked to live amongst them as a teenager five centuries ago,

who recalls in his memoir their diet of snakes, lizards, alligators, tortoises and many more disgusting  reptiles which, if I were to continue enumerating, we should never be through,

though we know from the less fastidious catalogues of archaeologists they also ate deer, otter, opposum, skunk,

ibis and heron, palmetto berries, sea grapes, manatees, porpoises, manta rays, shellfish in millennial numbers, numerous sharks, occasional whales,

and the small round seals rich with fat then prevalent along these shores, the last of which was sighted off the coast of Jamaica in 1936.

It’s another beautiful day in Miami, and as I search out a shady spot to eat, wandering the pathways of a campus that sprouts new buildings like mushrooms after every rainfall,

I am given cause to think of Henry Flagler, who commenced our ascent from hopeful shacks to gleaming and vainglorious ribbons of glass a mere one hundred and thirteen years ago,

and I think of Julia Tuttle’s alluring orange blossom, and John Collins’s original orchard, and Carl Fisher, who “carved a great city from the jungle,”

a motley lot of optimistic schemers whose visions of the future began the war the present has waged against the past for so long in South Florida.

Yes, it is another beautiful day in Miami, and when I have finished my chicken sandwich, and taken my medium-sized cup back to the ever-bubbling  soda fountain for a refill,

I am given cause to consider that quixotic conquistador whose quest for a magical, rejuvenating spring engendered Florida’s founding mythology,

and I want to say, thank you, Ponce de Leon, because if local history teaches us anything it is that the Fountain of Youth is no illusion—

it is real and it flows around us, everywhere, always—and that eternal font is youth itself,

each generation encountering  the old planet with fresh eyes and minds, remaking the world as it sees fit,

so the question is not whether change is coming but how it will be realized— by choice or by accident, through acts of wisdom or of thoughtlessness.

We cannot bring the West Indian monk seal back from extinction to frolic again in Biscayne Bay—only its bones remain in the midden  heaps of those vanished tribes.

We cannot retrieve what is gone but we can study its truths and seek to correct its errors, we can pay it homage and hold it sacred.

We cannot live forever, as Ponce desired—but what we create and what we believe in, what we teach and what we learn just might.

And now it is evening. Class is over. The students drift through the parking lots like pelagic jellyfish or mango pollen.

A full moon is rising above the skyline and as I drive the avenues and highways homeward I am given cause to consider the Apollo astronauts,

who flew all that way to just to hit a few golf balls when they could have stayed right here in Florida, where the fairways are so much kinder,

and I want to call out — come back, Neil Armstrong, for the moon is too cold and lonely for mankind,

come back, Ponce de Leon, we cannot make you young again, but you might find a good plastic surgeon and a nice condo on Bal Harbour,

come back, young Fernando d’Escalate Fontaneda, come back and enroll  in our nationally recognized School of Hospitality Management, and you will never have to eat another reptile,

come back, Henry Flagler and Julia Tuttle and Carl Fisher, come back all you builders and hucksters and immigrant believers,

come back to the intoxicatingly beautiful and complex metropolis you dreamed into being, because tomorrow is sure to be another beautiful day in Miami.