Things have been changing really quickly these last couple months, and, in 47 days, my daughter will be a high school graduate. Forty-seven short days of childhood left. I can't even comprehend that. I've spent the better part of almost two decades protecting her, bandaging her cuts, drying her tears, planning her birthday parties, taking her to dance competitions, and now I somehow have to let her go into a world that's so full of division and outright hate at the moment. It seems antithetical to everything in my father nature.
I know she's smart, strong, beautiful, and independent. I've told her that so many times over the years. That's her armor against a society that wants to tell her that she's dumb, weak, ugly, and useless without a man by her side. She's going to soar. I have no doubt about that. Having her in my life has been one of my greatest joys and honors.
And now, Saint Marty's heart is breaking a little.
Watching My Daughter Dance at Kaufman
Auditorium
by: Martin Achatz
She’s
a comet of leg and arm and sound,
burns
gold in the atmosphere of this place,
whirls,
spins, eats the oxygen near her,
a
celestial body that appears on no
star
chart, sails through the universe
on
no set orbit, glances off moons,
blasts
through asteroid belts and clouds
of
gas, ever expanding in her own
big
bang, flinging herself out and out
beyond
the edges of Lepus and Lupus,
Cygnus
and Scorpius, until she becomes
her
own constellation of dervish light.
Me? I believe the Earth is flat,
that
if I listen hard enough, I will
hear
oceans spilling off the horizon
into
the bowl of space, that I am
still
the center of her cosmology and my
gravity
still calls to her, pulls her back into
the
collapsing star of my heart.
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