Paideia
My poems are my children, and I swear
on the graves of my ancestors
I never laid a hand on them,
not even when they exasperated me,
when caring for them left me exhausted
and their cries in the night disturbed my sleep.
I discipline my poems only with hope
of my hard-won approval and the fear
of not being right for this magazine.
My poems are my children, and I have labored
to give them every advantage,
indulging them, up to a point,
and providing the very best education I could.
I let my poems read any book in my library,
even the dirty ones.
I don’t worry that they might be privileged.
I worry they might be stupid.
My poems have dared to keep off drugs,
even though they’re young
and think they are immortal,
even though, poetry being what it is these days,
the peer pressure to freak out is enormous.
Still, I fret about the company they keep
(audiences these days being what they are);
that’s why I implore my poems to be particular,
why I don’t mince words
about the facts of life.
My poems are practicing safe sex even as I speak.
Conceived in love and brought into this world
in agony and joy, my poems are my children
and better not call home for cash.
I’m not raising any mama’s boys.
It’s the mama’s-boy becomes the killer nerd,
and I instruct my poems
never to harm anyone with anything but panache.
Semblances and heirs, my poems
will weep when I am dead and confess
things they couldn’t tell me to my face:
how they loved me
but were embarrassed by me,
how once they tried to be
like me with small success,
and how in time
they struggled to be other
than I was and couldn’t do that, either.
When I am gone and exist only in my poems,
my line shall celebrate my days,
insisting that my acts were brave as any man’s,
that my thoughts were complex as another’s,
my loves as desperate, as intense.
Adroit, self-confident, and sly,
my poems are my children.
They know how to lie.
Copyright Credit: George Bradley, “Paideia” from The Fire Fetched Down. Copyright © 1996 by George Bradley. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: The Fire Fetched Down (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)