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werewolf
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The Spring of Children
I read a poem in the back of a paper,
Underneath the news,
About spring, by a fourth grade girl.
She was unnervingly talented.
Her elegance was as difficult and necessary
To start to speak of as a season.
There was spring in her winter
And winter in her spring.
Her poem said that poems did not have to rhyme,
Her poem spoke of “just spring”,
Flowers “just bloomed”,
her poem used a comma splice
To make only the barest mediation
Between flowers blooming, and warm spring wind.
I had read an article in Psychology Today earlier,
It said most major changes in the brain’s deep structures
Were fixed by 10 or 11. After that just learning -
Cyclical variations in words and behaviors.
Rare to hear people speak of children’s elegance,
Rather than their innocence.
No matter what we want from them,
We generally use the same rhetoric –
They are to be passively crushed into adulthood,
In a long process of crushing that we one day own –
Protection from a too fervent self,
Is what we know all too necessary when we coax and scald
On the velvet shackles
Like a Victorian boy’s dress.
But if someone asked you to recall when it was you made
Your first furtive glance,
You’d be hard pressed to tell them without instruction.
You remember the ritualized checkpoints –
The death of santa claus as you first pushed into that warmth
Making suddenly resounding the cold at your back and arms,
That you only then realized surrounded your body
Like phantoms and clouds,
Only ever undraped when in the safe warmth of play –
Hide and go seek? Kid’s stuff they say. You just don’t know yet kiddo,
And you become an adult when you first realize the lie -
neither do we.
People talk about children all the time,
How unnerving it is then
To hear a child speak of just spring,
And to use the word warm as I do.
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070518
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