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From: sara@mhuxj.UUCP (TRIGS)
Newsgroups: net.poems
Subject: poem
Message-ID: <382@mhuxj.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Jun-86 22:52:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: mhuxj.382
Posted: Thu Jun  5 22:52:17 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Jun-86 07:39:21 EDT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 30


IN PASSING: FOR CHARLOTTE ELENA, TWO YEARS AND TWO MONTHS OLD
 
Each day you plunge with glee into your future,
eagerly trying on our words and customs like new clothes,
tearing into the world around you like a Christmas package,
and there is no stopping you. You belie
in a moment the thousand snapshots we have taken.
In one, you stand in your bliss of Christmas morning
in the midst of half an hour's crumpled wrapping paper.
Morning sunlight streams in the window to light up
your hair (golden and bronze) and the bubbles
that your mother blows to you, drawing
from your face its fascinated, grave look.
Absurdly long I've pondered the forms of the bubbles
round, or elliptical with the force of your mother's breath,
each with a drop of sunlight. These lasted a wink
and burst before they'd floated to the floor,
yet together with the wrapping paper, and you, then,
they are here made immemorial forms:
I have stopped time then-- but, of course, this is a lie.
Sometimes I do not sleep, thinking of the bubbles.
Sometimes it grieves me to see you so precocious,
so eager, throwing away your Eden with two hands.
Sometimes I would beg forgiveness for the future
I have bequeathed you, full of unexplainable pain.
Yet my real gift will be to help you there, where you want to go,
to seasons sweet as this incipient spring,
to mornings like this, rinsed with sunlight and the song of birds
and beautiful in their passing.