and thought some of this might be familiar to this group...
THREE YEARS OLD
You trace the Yangtze river, then spin
the globe, the texture of topography
intoxicating under tiny fingers.
In silly seriousness, you sing
yourself electric when you find Antartica,
visions of Emperor penguins pull
on you like a magnet; you dream of icicles,
shiver with the thrill of snowfall. The world
isn�t big enough for your wonder. Dinosaurs
stomp across your dreams and their polysyllabic names
are scattered in the scat poetry of pretend play.
In your room hang planets of bright plastic dangling
around a crinkled paper sun. Their names roll off your tongue
in your sing song enthusiasm: Mercury Venus Earth
Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune you pause
�Pluto is considered a dwarf planet, right?� You know
which is hottest, closest to the sun, biggest,
and you tell me you will ride in a rocket ship
some day. I am stationary and you are moving away
in concentric circles from atoms to my arms to your telescope.
There are so many stars, so many possibilities
so will you lay with me here in the late day sun
of a mundane Sunday when I was imperfect
while I will count the seconds of stillness
before you leap away to look out a window
�those are cirrus� I answer before you ask.
Later we shred cotton balls to be clouds
in a sky of watercolor blue and our world is small
and you crawl into my lap and forget
triceratops, cumulonimbus, comets
and for a moment I was the sun
you spun around: silent
Last edited by TwinkleToes; 03/07/10 03:53 PM.