Child, if you were to stop your ageing
if we could freeze a peach, still firm, still sweet
at the moment before it rolled across the divide
from the promise of budded youth to ripeness and decay
how would your future proceed?
Would you keep your joy, your lack of adult cares?
Would the heaviness of heart within the grownup breast
be arrested with the breasts themselves?
Or is the dimming, the darkness not that of the body, but the soul?
Is it our fate that our hearts can stand
only a tiny bit of youthfulness
before the accumulated grit of experience grinds joy into tears,
hardens the eyes of women to accuse any who might look upon them?
Might you retain the body of a child but lose its shield of wonder
and be left tiny and unarmed in a world of continual silent assaults?
Though is it perhaps the eyes of man that flay at a woman
so that lash by lash scar replaces gentle skin?
Do those who are not blessed with child love
so view the rounded breast, the plumper thigh
that their glances harden them?
But then, if we were to emerge from silent corners
if the child lovers were to gaze at you
with the uncomplicated lust
with which the others confront your aging sisters
would these gazes too betray your soul
and doom each child's joy to the wary prisons
of this not-quite-paranoiac hell?
And has this started to corrupt each child now
as they are terrified by tales
of bad touch, lurking strangers, men in bushes, men in cars
(not knowing that the truest evil lurks
not within the alleys
but in the bedroom down the hall)?
Perhaps this fear that mutates the perception
of love into hunger
of protection into attack
of caring into cancerous hate
cannot forever be abated
and the hardening is a disease of years
inevitable as entropy, supernovas, glacial drift, and death
Perhaps
And thus perhaps we must just bless this moment
inscribe in the books of our memory the beauty of your sudden presence
then embrace this joy's impermanence
as we must unhold our breaths
open our hands and hearts
unstop time
and, sighing, let you go.