A Hymn to Childhood

Childhood? Which childhood? The one that didn’t last? The one in which you learned to be afraid of the boarded-up well in the backyard and the ladder in the attic? The one presided over by armed men in ill-fitting uniforms strolling the streets and alleys, while loudspeakers declared a new era, and the house around you grew bigger, the rooms farther apart, with more and more people missing? The photographs whispered to each other from their frames in the hallway. The cooking pots said your name each time you walked past the kitchen. And you pretended to be dead with your sister in games of rescue and abandonment. You learned to lie still so long the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled safety of a wing. Look! In run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting, turning over the furniture, smashing your mother’s china. Don’t fall asleep. Each act opens with your mother reading a letter that makes her weep. Each act closes with your father fallen into the hands of Pharaoh. Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you, still a child, and slow to grow. Still talking to God and thinking the snow falling is the sound of God listening, and winter is the high-ceilinged house where God measures with one eye an ocean wave in octaves and minutes, and counts on many fingers all the ways a child learns to say Me. Which childhood? The one from which you’ll never escape? You, so slow to know what you know and don’t know. Still thinking you hear low song in the wind in the eaves, story in your breathing, grief in the heard dove at evening, and plentitude in the unseen bird tolling at morning. Still slow to tell memory from imagination, heaven from here and now, hell from here and now, death from childhood, and both of them from dreaming.