"A Poem for Emily" 

Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me,

a hand's width and two generations away,

in this still present I am fifty-three.

You are not yet a full day.

When I am sixty-three, when you are ten,

and you are neither closer nor as far,

your arms will fill with what you know by then,

the arithmetic and love we do and are.

When I by blood and luck am eighty-six

and you are someplace else and thirty-three

believing in sex and god and politics

with children who look not at all like me,

sometime I know you will have read them this

so they will know I love them and say so

and love their mother. Child, whatever is

is always or never was. Long ago,

a day I watched awhile beside your bed,

I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept

awhile, to tell you what I would have said

when you were who knows what and I was dead

which is I stood and loved you while you slept.

~Miller Williams