A Hymn to Childhood

Childhood? Which childhood?

The one that didn’t last?

The one in which you learned to be afraid

of the boarded-up well in the backyard

and the ladder in the attic?

The one presided over by armed men

in ill-fitting uniforms

strolling the streets and alleys,

while loudspeakers declared a new era,

and the house around you grew bigger,

the rooms farther apart, with more and more

people missing?

The photographs whispered to each other

from their frames in the hallway.

The cooking pots said your name

each time you walked past the kitchen.

And you pretended to be dead with your sister

in games of rescue and abandonment.

You learned to lie still so long

the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled

safety of a wing. Look! In

run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting,

turning over the furniture,

smashing your mother’s china.

Don’t fall asleep.

Each act opens with your mother

reading a letter that makes her weep.

Each act closes with your father fallen

into the hands of Pharaoh.

Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you,

still a child, and slow to grow.

Still talking to God and thinking the snow

falling is the sound of God listening,

and winter is the high-ceilinged house

where God measures with one eye

an ocean wave in octaves and minutes,

and counts on many fingers

all the ways a child learns to say Me.

Which childhood?

The one from which you’ll never escape? You,

so slow to know

what you know and don’t know.

Still thinking you hear low song

in the wind in the eaves,

story in your breathing,

grief in the heard dove at evening,

and plentitude in the unseen bird

tolling at morning. Still slow to tell

memory from imagination, heaven

from here and now,

hell from here and now,

death from childhood, and both of them

from dreaming.

Source: Behind My Eyes (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2008)

Li-Young Lee: Essential American Poets