The weather for the Bowdoin Commencement on May 24 quickly shifted from gray and misty to a downpour just as the first diplomas were being distributed. Looking back years from now, people will remember Weatherspoon (they/them), the senior who delivered a powerful commencement speech, just as much as the rain.

I first encountered Weatherspoon’s talent when I saw them read a moving poem to honor Bowdoin’s new President Safa Zaki during the weekend of her inauguration in October 2023.

A few weeks later, I spotted Weatherspoon at the Thorne Dining Hall and congratulated them on an amazing poem. “You’re so kind,” they said. “Give me a big hug.” And I did.

I was thrilled to learn that Weatherspoon had been selected as one of two seniors to give a speech at commencement. I knew the speech would rock the house. And it did.

Here’s an excerpt from that speech: “As a young child, I was homeless, sleeping on those cold shelter floors. My brother and I used to panhandle outside of grocery stores, begging our community members to feed us. We were too hungry to perform well in school. Our lives were totally and completely ruled by the poverty that we were born into. All the while, I harbored a second hunger, a hunger for knowledge. I stole phonetics books from my elementary school and used them to teach my older brother how to read. Together we studied in the dark and prayed for better lives. So I mean it when I say that today is an answered prayer. I had no idea then that I would become an academic and a writer. I couldn’t see the future, but I believed in it. In my own purpose.”

Consider just some of the things this creative force has accomplished in just 22 years on this Earth:

• Written five poetry books, one of which (“To, Too Many Children: a Collection of Moments”) became an Amazon bestseller.

• Spent a summer in Cleveland launching a program that explores kinship and meaning making through the lens of poetry in an underfunded community for high school–aged foster children.

• Created and implemented wellness programming for the Bowdoin College student body that centers around poetry and creative expression.

• Generated at Bowdoin community participation in a sold-out, 200-seat, rock-opera show; organized the use of a 300-seat theater for a poetry concert featuring local talent with two headliners and 10 other performers.

• Collaborated with the Bismuth Quartet and the 22nd United States Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith on original poetry set to music by composer Jasmine Barnes, an Emmy Award–winning composer.

• Commissioned for 12 original poems by first chair violinist in the Cleveland Orchestra, Milo Hashizume, in collaboration with City Music Cleveland and composers Jasmine Barnes and Jessica Meyer.

After graduation, Weatherspoon plans to spend the summer in Cleveland inspiring foster children and then move to Los Angeles to pursue a career in screenwriting. Prospects look good since they have already written two movie screenplays.

Weatherspoon is obviously a creative phenomenon. They began writing down thoughts at age 12 and written every day since then, always bursting with new ideas, new ways of seeing the world.

Here’s how Weatherspoon concluded their speech:

“I am living proof that the future is malleable and that your voice is all it takes to shape it. The late great writer Toni Morrison once wrote that ‘the purpose of evil is to survive it.’ Which to me means that together we are more kind for having experienced intolerance. We are more confident for having experienced self doubt and we are more brave for having felt fear in this life. We cannot always know where we’re going, but somehow we always get there. And maybe the grandest lesson I’ve learned in my four years at Bowdoin is that you don’t need to know what your purpose is in order to live it out. Purpose is happening all around us and we are in it the way we are in the world. Much like this commencement ceremony today, when purpose calls your name from far into the future, you don’t need to recognize its voice, all you have to do is stand and receive it. Thank you, Class of 2025, for everything.”

The commencement crowd erupted in sustained applause. Moreover, the entire Bowdoin Class of 2025 gave Weatherspoon, their one-of-a-kind classmate, a standing ovation, the only one I witnessed over the entire weekend.

Thank you, Weatherspoon, for sharing your lessons and your love with the world.

David Treadwell, a Brunswick writer, welcomes commentary and suggestions for future “Just a Little Old” columns at dtreadw575@aol.com.