family

F A M I L Y

Her glow is frail fair limb,

In the hollows for cradling,

Lace of blue veins,

Thought plug

Conceals live wiring,

Though,

Long into the embryonic past receding,

A powerful emotion

Telescopes it ever,

Mother.

For what is just right,

An unerring instinct

She warmly displays;

Reconciling

All my erratics,

Her thread

Hold our beads

Firmly together;

Consorting.

Bright daffodil daughter

In twin pigtails

Like wings,

Flutter in her self made songs

As she amuses

Herself with her playthings

Or hops steps

And jumps along

Beyond the simple

Pure and trusting

Ten, unmindful,

Costume jewellery

And all.

Intense, precisely measured

Keenly watching

Eyes whose

Enormous trust

You cannot just fail

To match,

Pursue;

Three foot omnipresence

That smiles uncomprehendingly

Therefore forgivingly

When you fail him,

Impels the best

Out of your

Grave limitations.

You cannot trust him entirely

To let you down,

Somewhere he will be

Father,

Prove that years of experience

Still leave him uncynical,

Yet now

With the lifting

Of your rose-tinted childhood,

He does betray

What his tight set curls

And weak memory

Had striven hard to conceal

But cannot escape

Your own grey-haired

Comprehension.

The monstrous possibility

Of a trust molested

Unfeelingly like

The knowledge

That it was never the sun

that swung around you,

Begins to erase

The foundations

Of your first presumptions.

A trusted custodian’s pilferage

Of your wealth

Prepares you

To doubt

There can be absolutes,

That you may well if in a corner

Revert just to yourself

Negating.

You may

But must not fail,

Transcending equations

Of give and take,

For it is in giving that we receive

And in receiving that we take

And yet

It remains

Undecided.

Credit: marymademe.com

Change is a fundamental fact of life. The Buddha observed that everything changes all the time and this is a cause of sorrow. If we remain equanimous while experiencing change sorrow will not afflict us. We ourselves change from moment to moment. We are not the same person which we see in a photographs of the past – childhood, youth, maturity, yesterday, five minutes ago. They are all different persons seemingly connected. It is as if we reincarnate from moment to moment not merely at the end of a life. We are able to observe this phenomenon more acutely in our children – they keep changing quite remarkably and if we were not conscious of it the child who you knew scarcely resembles what he is now – with varied experiences of life transforming him every moment. This thought is not a sophisticated intellectual excercise but a vivid realization which all parents have known even if they did not put it down in words. My poem seeks to capture such a feeling, difficult to explain, like a rare visual caught suddenly on your camera:

THE CHILD I KNEW

Where is the child I knew,

Merged now in my grown son’s face ?

As if he just left the stage

And moved behind the wings

Allowing another to take his place.

Where his high voice has gone

Never to return, his little face ?

Another person I love well

Now inhabits that space,

Till I meet him again and another

Man has replaced the one I knew,