"Children" by Peter Mladini

Children to me is a word in a song,

Think, by James Brown. I don’t know

Children, I’m out of touch with their hopscotch

And video games, no father with a daughter, a son

And interruptions they’d bring and pleasures.

But I was once a son, a child. So much

Of us formed in those early years. People

Who might say, You’re regressing, stuck

In childhood, that’s a shortsighted view.

Everything the child sees is big. For the child,

No matter his or her physical make up, is small.

To the child people are big, big as trees,

And the field is vast, so there’s the small

Child in his or her big world; the river

Is wide and deep, wider, deeper to the child.

I’m telling you this because you too were once a son,

A child, also, when you were living, a husband

Who lost one wife (in death) and married

Another, whom I’d never met, though I knew

The first, her voice, her angular face.

Why you left, why you stopped being you,

My friend, is a mystery. For a poet,

I think you were better than most,

At least those I knew, and also as a friend

You were generous, genuine, unsentimental.

You were handsome, witty, bright; in college

You played baseball, second base as I see you

On the diamond. When I met you, you said

The word recovering; well, that quilt of recovery

Somehow unraveled, though I didn’t see that,

Didn’t see you fall off the wagon into an abyss

That perhaps others, near you at the time,

Could see: He’s in an abyss—I wonder

If anyone, or two, at the time said that,

Silently or to you, or to others. Why?

Why am I talking as if you could hear?

You are now part of the silence, the nothing

That’s not ours, the living. So I call to you

From the other side of the river, or rather

From my side of the wall that separates us.

You’d understand, about how for the child

All is magnified, a twig on the ground in the woods,

The damp earth, the mint freshness of leaves

Or crisp winter leaves under his or her feet.

In the woods of childhood, the blue jay squawks

And the child hears keener than I. Why

Did you leave? A mystery. The child’s world

Mysterious, so different from the mystery

Of you that perhaps there’s a sameness.

You argued, wanted milk not artificial creamer,

For too long a time one restaurant morning:

A memory so ordinary, like your rumpled

Chinos, blue eyes, cleft in your chin.

And then the poems, which all had an edge

And spoke to what it means to be human.