Letter To A Young Child Poem by Rasma Haidri

To write a small note

each day of his first-born's life

did not seem too big a task.

My father's small squared printing

filled the three-cent postcards.

They are yellowed now.

The blue ballpoint lines

flattened under age-brittle

strips of cellophane tape.


Later, I watched his hands writing.

It may have been an address,

a list of errands, a letter home

the musical Arabic curving backwards

like a path to retrieve dreams. I loved

his nails shining like quarter moons

under clear lacquer polish, his long fingers

moving the pen delicately, as with reverence

for a living thing.


In old college notebooks

where his dissertation notes left off, I wrote.

A city newspaper, spy plans, interviews on Viet Nam,

my first French words: Bonjour, Je suis, J'habite

a day by day record of my life

in stories, poems, letters to no one

or to the world.


Thus the art is handed down

in pens, the love of paper,

the evening hush in a house

where nothing is said

but by the one writing

to the one who has yet to receive.


When you were two,

I bought a large sketchbook

and began to write.

The small pack of my father's postcards

teaches me to promise nothing.

Only to write, and to imagine him

standing in white shirtsleeves

his script as measured as the pulse

beating in his temples

in the late night house

when he had only us

and all the time in the world.



(first published in Passages North, Northern Michigan University Press,1998)