Your Little Girl Poem by Robert Rorabeck

If this is a game in cricks and solitude,
I have no bats to swing: the birds have no cages in which
To sing,
And they go out and make a naked Christmas underneath the
Naked wings of holiday’s airplanes:
And I love you,
Alma: Oh, how I love you- even while my words dry up in the
Hidden pools of venal mermaids:
Even under the shade cloths of the Mercado which bares your name:
That you have kissed me and we have tugged our
Bodies through the rolling air-conditions,
That I have strutted like a rooster around the water cooler rustling my
Comb and blushing and calling out the hours clearly:
How much time I have left to live, and for the pilgrims of our
Legacy to rustle their heads up from the hungry walls of our ancestral
Adobes,
And to march out again across the highways, over the orange groves
And the sugar canes,
Swinging their censers and making a smoky dragon while the airplanes
Leap and pinwheels like little girls have birthdays:
Just the same as you held your little girl named
Heidi today and for a little while she turned and smiled to me.