Poems Not Written For My Sons

POEMS NOT WRITTEN FOR MY SONS


for Brendan, Jeremy, Connor, and Aidan


This is the poem
I never wrote for you, the moments
lost forever, the small
wonders I never noticed
or, if noticed, never
set to pen--the way your
infant eyelids are bruise blue,
for instance, or how your arms
snap open like wings when waking
and how you look at us the way
clouds must have looked at
the first waters five billion years ago.

This is the poem of how life
unfolds in fat thighs, first words,
fingers in the frosting and falling
down, tying shoes and riding bikes.
The first steps you take are always away
and then you come back with lizards,
painted pictures, the bright bubble seed, ice
the size of broken glass and just as fragile
and say to me
look at what you have given
but I am too busy with lectures,
essays, the many many books
but you are happy because I am there
and I am not because I am gone
forgetting to remember that you are poems,
everything you do is a poem
waiting to be spoken
and by the time I remember
your hands are almost as big as mine
and I am lost in time
like seeds that fall far from the tree
and never take root in hard December soil.


Richard Smyth

Posted over on Anabiosis Press