Poem

Carolyn Kizer

CHILDREN

What good are children anyhow?
                                         They only break your heart.
The one that bore your fondest hopes
                                         will never amount to anything.
The one you slaved to give the chances you never had
                                         rejects them with contempt.
They won't take care of you in your old age.
                                         They don't even write home.
They don't follow in your footsteps.
They don't avoid your mistakes.
It's impossible to save them from pain.
                                         And of course they never listen.

Remember how you hung on the lips
                                         of your father or grandfather,
Begging for the old stories:
                                         "Again! Tell it again!
                                         What was it like 'in olden times' "?
We have good stories too:
                                         funny, instructive, pathetic.
Forget it. Write them down for your friends.
Your friends, with whom you have that unspoken pact:
Don't ask me about my children, and I won't inquire of

yours.
Remember how we used to exchange infant pictures?
How we boasted of cute sayings? How we . . .

                                                                   Forget it.
Put away those scrapbooks, with the rusted flute in the

closet,
                                         with the soiled ballet-slippers.
tear up the clumsy Valentines.
Tear up every crayoned scrap that says, 'I love you,

Mama.'
They don't want us to keep those mementoes;
                                           they find them embarrassing.
Those relics of dependent love,
The orange crayon that didn't dare write 'I hate you.'
Forget their birthdays, as they forget yours.

Perhaps because they never finish anything,
                                                  not a book, not a school,
Their politics are cruel and sentimental:
Some monster of depravity
                             who destroyed millions with his smile,
Who shadowed our youth with terror,
                                                      is a hero to them.
Now he smiles benignly from their walls.

Because they are historyless, they don't believe in history:
                                         Stalin wasn't so bad.
                                         The Holocaust didn't really happen.
                                         Roosevelt was a phony.
But the worst of it is:
                                         they don't believe we ever believed;
They don't believe we ever had ideals.
They don't believe we were ever poor.
They don't believe that we were passionate
                                         - or that we are passionate today!

Forget it. Don't torture yourself.
                                         You still have some life to salvage.
Get divorced. Go on diet.
Take up the career you dropped for them twenty years

ago.
Go back to the schools they deserted, and sign up for courses:
Study Tranquility 101, Take Meditation; Enroll for Renewal.

Remember those older friends we used to envy,
                                         brilliant and glittering with beauty
Who refused to have children,
                                         not about to sacrifice their careers;
Who refused the mess, the entrapment
                           as we toiled over chores and homework,
                           worried about measles and money . . .
Have you seen them lately?
They no longer converse in sparkling cadenzas.
They are obsessed with their little dog
                                         who piddles on their Oriental rug,
                                         who throws up on their bedspreads.
They don't notice his bad breath;
His incessant yapping doesn't seem to disturb them.
To be honest about it,
                                         the whole apartment smells!
And the way they babble him in pet names
                                         instead of Milton, Chaucer, Dante.
The way they caress him makes you fairly ill;
                                         the way they call him, 'Baby.'