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A Song for the Putting Away of Childish Things



We have packed it away in the dark

of the messiest closet of mind

to be lost in the wrack of remembrance. We sigh, resigned


to the leaving of magic, the loss

of the years when all possible worlds

lay asleep on our shoulders, entangled in baby-fine curls


or triked down the sidewalk, hell-bent,

or giggled in mud-puddle goo.

The shove of their always becoming, the shock of the new—


What happened? The pinch-penny gears

that no fairy-tale rearing can halt

have ground their lives gray. It’s living’s unfortunate fault


that they grow into magicless lives,

to be shackled to screens and to desks

and to watch while the people who love them turn into grotesques


as inexorably it goes on:

the organ-by-organ oration,

the next of our bodies’ betrayals, the next medication . . .


They struggle and drudge, undreaming,

not speaking, not where we can hear.

But we know what they think. We can picture their heads bending near


in the coffee-shop booth where they meet,

and they sip, and their fingertips drum

while they whisper together their fears for what we will become.

 

Maryann Corbett is the author of six books, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan University Press). Her work has appeared widely in journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including 32 Poems, Rattle, and the Los Angeles Review of Books in the US and The Dark Horse and PN Review in the UK. Her poetry has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and the Poetry Foundation website, and was included in The Best American Poetry 2018. New work appears in the New Statesman and Image and is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, and Raritan, among others.

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