The Child Within
You are waiting in an airport lounge, your feet crouched under you to escape the smashed paper cup oozing grimy coffee grounds and the dropped sweet wrapper’s sticky pinkness shining up at you, vying for your shoe.
The flock of folk creating a clamour, less of noise than of vibrations in your liver and spleen. The dry piped heat so intense that your neck is repulsed by your own hair and your forearms fuse to your jacket when you wrench it off.
Then comes the growl and fizz of the microphone:
A three-hour delay is announced.
A moment of silence as the adults resign to what must be.
That collective hardening of spine and softening of throat is all we can express.
But soon, a single yelp: A small, clammy whine of “Mummy, I want to go home!”
You hear it with your stomach, not your ears.
Yes! You breathe; yes, you want to wail, too. And not just with a quiet tear, politely rolling down your cheek. What use is that?
You want to kick the chair and pout and stick your tongue out at that staring old busybody across the aisle.
But we must perch upright.
No lap to curl into, no soft shoulder to rest our hot cheek.
These comforts are no longer ours to expect, but that does not mean we have outgrown them.
The pangs remain forever for the child within.
These Kids on Their Phones
We tut knowingly at the bent head of the girl beneath those winking-wet leaves.
Immersed so obliviously that she never sees the chandeliers of tiny pinecones
or the stepping-stone clouds above her.
Nor hears the swish-sweep of cicadas
or the black raspberry bumblebees that stitch the sky.
She does not sense the slow-fast-slow of the stream
as it tumbles over rocks and pauses before tipping over.
And yet,
I see her fulgent smile through her flag of hair.
I hear her chinkling laugh,
and I know she is happy as can be.
Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden
There are none, of course.
That loose-dropped petal is
hardly a fallen bonnet.
And the curled brown leaf, never
a cradle for an infant elf.
Some might see that bright toadstool as shelter
for the shivering imp who fell in a puddle,
but not I.
And what of those scratchings on a felled twig?
Hopscotch markings, they could not be.
Those cotton wisp buds in autumn bushes
might be reminiscent of tiny caught garments
if one were so foolish as to
dream of pixies returning from a night ball—
tipsy on acorn cups,
sticky with honeysuckle juice.
But my poem is no place
for such poppycock,
so I’ll not write a word of it.
«LECTURA RELACIONADA» POEMS BY CAROLYN CHILTON CASAS: My Intention, Dreaming in Poems, My Muse»
imagen: ArtsyBee
