February 28: Helping My Daughter, Philip Levine, "Among Children"

These last couple nights, I have been helping my daughter construct a resume for her application for the National Honor Society.  It has been a wonderful experience, because we've been together and she listens to my advice and laughs at my jokes.  We have bonded over this mundane task.  The first resume of many she will probably have to write in her lifetime.

It's difficult for me to think about her as a junior in high school.  That, as a friend of mine pointed out a couple days ago, she is not longer my "little girl."  She's a beautiful young woman.  Pretty independent, too.  I count that as a parental success. 

Tonight will probably be the last for this task.  I will also, probably, read the essay she has written about success in life.  It will be full of hope and ambition and excitement.  All the things that accompany youth.  And it will fill me with pride and a little sadness.

Children can't stay children forever, I know.  I just want to arm my daughter with what little wisdom I have gained in my life, so that she can learn from my mistakes.

Saint Marty has made plenty of those.

Among Children

by:  Philip Levine

I walk among the rows of bowed heads--
the children are sleeping through fourth grade
so as to be ready for what is ahead,
the monumental boredom of junior high
and the rush forward tearing their wings
loose and turning their eyes forever inward.
These are the children of Flint, their fathers
work at the spark plug factory or truck
bottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs
to the widows of the suburbs.  You can see
already how their backs have thickened,
how their small hands, soiled by pig iron,
leap and stutter even in dreams.  I would like
to sit down among them and read slowly
from The Book of Job until the windows
pale and the teacher rises out of a milky sea
of industrial scum, her gowns streaming
with light, her foolish words transformed
into song, I would like to arm each one
with a quiver of arrows so that they might
rush like wind there where no battle rages
shouting among the trumpets, Ha! Ha!
How dear the gift of laughter in the face
of the 8 hour day, the cold winter mornings
without coffee and oranges, the long lines
of mothers in old coats waiting silently
where the gates have closed.  Ten years ago
I went among these same children, just born,
in the bright ward of the Sacred Heart and leaned
down to hear their breaths delivered that day,
burning with joy.  There was such wonder
in their sleep, such purpose in their eyes
closed against autumn, in their damp heads
blurred with the hair of ponds, and not one
turned against me or the light, not one
said, I am sick, I am tired, I will go home,
not one complained or drifted alone,
unloved, on the hardest day of their lives.
Eleven years from now they will become
the men and women of Flint or Paradise,
the majors of a minor town, and I
will be gone into smoke and memory,
so I bow to them here and whisper
all I know, all I will never know.