Parents Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

What we desire most in the world
is the happiness of our children -
it's in their eyes that we're reborn.
Each new world birth embodies hope
that the entropy of existence
can be permanently reversed:
that within the weary world
there lies a secret, perfect plateau -
a Shangri-la to ward off time.

We bask in their energy of love,
trying to keep at bay the world's
ways of strangling it: the dreary
rules, the endless list of tasks
to learn, the pointless conformity
to a state of mutual blindness.

And finally we wave them off
into the world on their bright new painted
bicycles, with only prayer
to keep them upright - ready to rush
around the corner when the woeful
cries first reach our anxious antennæ,
ready one last time to revive
the changing relationship.

Yet within all this there's fear:
fear of the unanswerable questions:
- when their fierce sense of rightness
challenges our lazy defaults:
- when our inability
to mould our own lives renders us
unfitted to mould anyonelse's,
let alone someone we love, and yet
we have to make decisions for them
when they look to us for guidance,
and we long to cry ‘I've no
idea; I'm as much at sea as you.'
But we play the adult card
tho they know we lie.
And so
the wedge enters, hammered home
by each successive blow
of our inadequacy.
Until
they stop looking to us for love
for they can see the cupboard's bare;
and for such comfort as they find
must turn elsewhere.
And so
the world is marred anew, as it
must be to germinate the shoots
of a new life, dormant in the earth.


13/1/11