To J.B.
I think of the day you were born.
So small, you quivered in this cold new world.
I remember those first couple of years,
as you struggled to come to terms with
this land of giants with high-pitched voices and
exaggerated expressions
I’ve heard your gibberish chatter
form foreign words and phrases.
I wonder if your language of ga-ga’s and goo-goo’s
held more meaning than any language I know now.
What secrets from the womb and the world before
were you trying so desperately to convey?
No one understands.
Maybe it is beyond our comprehension.
It has become everyone’s dead language,
and now it has already become one for you too.
I’ve seen your innocence,
and the moments that gave a glimpse
into the inevitable loss of it:
Oh why do you cry so, when your mother must attend to your brother?
And stick out your tongue and make that nasty face,
when all I try to do is nourish your body?
But the purity of your smile,
and your heart-filled laugh,
make all amends for me.
Who says you need perfect teeth to have the perfect smile?
You seemed to be able to pull it off just fine without a single pearly white.
No doubt, a picture of you (placed in the right magazines and ads, of course)
can render all orthodontists unemployed.
Soon enough, your day will come.
After these current obstacles of monkey bars and swings,
after school, friends, jobs, maybe a bit of rebellion, and more jobs,
someone else will come into your world,
speaking a language vaguely familiar but foreign,
smiling a beautiful smile that,
if pasted onto your own “grown-up” face, would be ugly.
And you’ll wonder as I do today,
“Was I really once just like you?”
Sigur Ros – “Hoppipolla” (follow link)
I hate when people immediately assume that whatever you write (especially when you write fiction) is directly about you, the writer/author. We’re in the freakin’ 21st century people. What with all this post-modernist/modernist writing floating around for damn near a hundred years, with all its quirky meta-fictional tricks and inverted/reversed/weird narrative voices and styles, (more…)
Hopping Into Puddles 