she opened

she opened
starry eyes
on glowing world
forty years ago
gasping autumn air
as red leaves
hovered in the
misty trees
as beautiful as these
in parent's aching hearts
watching as she starts
to know their face
"will her years be
full of grace?"
they wonder
how her journey
will unfold

"forty year's old"
they write
inside the gilded card
(how far this child
has been and seen
beneath the climbing sun)
"happy birthday" in the
book with papered lines
she reads with
shining eyes
oh goodbye to
memoried yesterday
today she's
born again

Can You See Yourself

can you see yourself as a child
in some image of the past?
chequered picnic blankets by the
blue water
sand castles suspended under
younger faces
(in their excellency
these are perfect graces)
beyond reclamation but for
their fuzzy traces
did i miss something there?
what did i forget to do?
who am i
to raise this child's ghost?
am i still that little boy
beneath the elm and
mother's spreading smile?

Cole

there are no promises in this life
not even life itself
Cole was 11 months old when
he died of leukemia
how many prayerful nights his
parents sat watching his
tiny form
happy child brought down into
the grave
newly born dead before the
end of your first year

That Peculiar Intensity

"Don't mistake what I'm talking about. It's not that I'm trying to put across any of that poetry of childhood stuff. I know that's all baloney. Old Porteous (a friend of mine, a retired schoolmaster, I'll tell you about him later) is great in the poetry of childhood. Sometimes he reads me stuff about it out of books. Wordsworth. Lucy Gray. There was a time when meadow, grove - and all that. Needless to say he's got no kids of his own. The truth is that kids aren't in any way poetic, they're merely savage little animals, except that no animal is a quarter as selfish. A boy isn't interested in meadows, groves and so forth. He never looks at a landscape, doesn't give a damn for flowers, and unless they affect him in some way, such as being good to eat, he doesn't know one plant from another. Killing things - that's about as near to poetry as a boy gets. And yet, all the while there's that peculiar intensity, the power of longing for things as you can't long when you're grown up, and the feeling that time stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you're doing you could go on forever."

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air

Jeffrey Baldwin's Tribute

Tribute's arrive too late
As if a consolation to the living
While little boy's silence
Lingers there where tortured life
Hungry neglect
Emaciation dissolution
Superman antithesis
Projection of our need to believe
A spirit overcoming
The worst of human depravation
But there was no overcoming
Little spirit lately crushed
Did you feel like Superman?
Tattered feces-filled pajamas
Climbing weakly up those stairs
To die of kryptonite indifference
Oh human tragedy! 
What love and joy you could have known
What comfort were you given?
There gasping chill floor
Scraps and child indistinguishable
We built you a goddamn statue
As hard and cold as the ones you loved

Merry Christmas, or What's in a Greeting?

It seems Christmas has become thoroughly.. multicultural. The debate over whether one should say "happy holidays" or not should finally come to an end. One should have no more difficulty saying "Merry Christmas" than Happy Thursday or Merry Wednesday, though hopefully with a greater twinkle in the eye.

A friendly detractor may say, yes but hasn't Christmas always been multicultural?  To this I must agree, but add that it was multicultural in a different kind of way.  Christmas has always been multicultural precisely because Christians have always been multicultural.  The multiculturalism I speak of today is different.  Now not only Christians celebrate Christmas, but non-Christians too, and these in far greater numbers than ever before.  It has led to the now common sighting of the little white and red signs in front of people's houses or on their cars which say "Keep Christ in Christmas".  There would be no need to make such declarations unless already Christmas was seen as existing outside the circle of Christianity.  How odd this is considering "Christ" is already in Christmas, literally forming part of the word.  

This marks a transition I have perhaps not so subtly referred to above when I use the greetings "Happy Thursday" and "Merry Wednesday".  For some time now these words have lost their religious connotations for us, except for a very few pagans perhaps.   Wednesday of course was named for the Norse god Odin or the Saxon Wodan, the All-Father.  Thursday was named for one of his sons, the god of thunder Thor:  Wodan's-day and Thor's-day respectively.  We may greet one another quite cheerfully with a "happy Thursday" and think nothing of it.  There are many cultural/religious artifacts that we use in this way.  So the term "Christmas" has slipped toward this usage, demonstrated by the insistence of Christians that we keep the "Christ" in Christmas, as a kind of resistance to the transition that is already taking place. 

The insistence in so many schools that we refrain from saying "Merry Christmas" or have Christmas concerts is a sign therefore of a number of things.  First, interestingly it is a sign that schools are colluding with Christians to keep Christmas a religious holiday (and thus not a celebration appropriate for all their students), this despite the availability of a number of Christmas symbols that are capable of carrying both religious and secular meaning almost entirely in either direction.  Think of Santa Claus, the Christmas tree, gift-giving... all of these can be thought of in terms completely unrelated to the Advent of Christ, and in fact are thought of this way by many many people.  Following this point, schools themselves therefore restrict our freedom to define Christmas in whatever way we choose, already naming for us the meaning of Christmas (i.e. it has religious meaning).  This is similar to arguing that Santa Claus can only be white or Canadian etc., failing to take into account the symbolic givenness of the season and the signs of its presence.  Christmas, unchained from a specific cultural interpretation, becomes not devoid of meaning, but free in its openness to us.  Instead of shying away from its celebration in schools, now may be the time to ask each beautiful little child what it means to them and their families.  It is precisely in that chorus of small voices that we might hear the melody and meaning of Christmas emerge. 

In my boyhood days -Hölderlin

In my boyhood days
  Often a god would save me
    From the shouts and from the rods of men;
      Safe and good then I played
        With the orchard flowers
          And the breezes of heaven 
            Played with me.

And as you make glad
The hearts of the plants 
When toward you they stretch
Their delicate arms.

So you made glad my heart,
Father Helios, and like Endymion
I was your darling,
Holy Luna.

O all you loyal,
Kindly gods!
Would that you knew how
My soul loved you then.

True, at that time I did not
Evoke you by name yet, and you
Never named me, as men use names,
As though they knew one another.

Yet I knew you better
Than ever I have known men,
I understood the silence of Aether,
But human words I´ve never understood.

I was reared by the euphony
Of the rustling copse
And learned to love
Amid the flowers.

I grew up in the arms of the gods.

Suffer the little children

Two year Beauty
Killed by indiff'rence
Angels and God watch
You burn in hell
 

Child, 2, dies after being left in car

Suffer the little children

Children are society's most precious beings, and her most innocent victims.  Anyone who really knows a child can never accept that child's abuse, not without a deeply perverse heart.  Those who thirst for war are numbered among those with such a heart.

(Iraqi orphan drew a picture of his mom and went to sleep in its arms.) 

Sister passing

In mother's eyes streamed love
Child born into the world
Heart and lungs too weak to work
Hope's finger grasped in little hand

Today you died sweet infant
Heaven does not answer prayers
Can those prayers bring comfort now?
She's gone false consolation!

(Indifferent heaven Thee we curse
Oh that we might forget Thee
Unrequited love Thou mockest
Impotent Omnipotence!)

Tiny child we loved you
More than gods know how
Tonight a candle lit
To honour sister's passing

Kayleigh

Life's fragility
Kayleigh
Ripples spread across the face
Of saltwater-rimmed puddles
Your delicate feet tread lightly home
Dear Kayleigh

Blind machine blind hand! (a scream)

Rose crushed beneath a boot
O God, the finality.
"My child is gone..." (a horror!)
Did you say goodbye
Dear Kayleigh?

Will your crumpled frame not rise?
Will your tiny feet not walk?
This steam that rises from your body
As spirit flees indifferent earth
O broken little heart