The Beautiful Holidays Their Mothers Told To Them Poem by Robert Rorabeck

As light as a castle
Fitted for Cinderalla into the air,
I take my three year old daughter
For a walk around the
Block in Boca Raton:
After crespescule, into the loam:
She practices catching the moon-
Up above the mailboxes,
where the stewardesses and
Astronauts live,
Making gins in the hollers of the moon:

Seeing there, you can catch them
Out of the corner of your make believe eye,
As your mother and older brother
Remain at home-

Impregnated by the mowed lawns of
Disney World,
This world around us is blind and
Well-sated, impersonated
By an elemantary's tongues:
Even the alligators are bucolic
forever slowed into the greened game-boards
of the everglades

Diademed by the luxury hotels
The airplanes skip off of like stones:
And would be lovers who think they are
In love forever, standing fattened from
The Eucharist of their honeymoons
Atop the stoned arms of cenotaphs-

The beaten crosses mark the native soldiers
Recessed into the mangroves with the dead
Girls whose eyes are like the centers of
Universes,

And my daughter is just three years old
Atop of the planes-I look at her and remember
A Pocahantis of my dreams suplanted
By a Disney matinee of comic relief racoons
and indians who speak often bitterly the Queen's English-

Around us, the house wives go to sleep
So quietly, as if fawns white-tailed into the
Cul-de-sacs of naroleptic turtle-doves:
They seem to sleep around us forever,
Hypothesising beautifully, believing the juvenile truths of their elementary schools,
the beautiful holidays their mother told to
Them to put them well to sleep
Harnessed into their tongues.