WE DIE WHEN THE CHILD IN US DIES
WE DIE WHEN THE CHILD IN US DIES
We do not die when the heart forgets its beat beneath the heavy earth,
we die slowly, on the day the child in us falls asleep,
when we no longer see paper kites stitched into the summer sky,
and the puddle in the yard is no longer a sea of mercury.
We die when rain is no longer a sky of melted beads,
but merely a nuisance soaking shoes polished by worry,
when we no longer fold leaf-boats to drift along the gutters,
and the moon is no longer a coin stolen from the pocket of night.
We die when laughter dries up like a well of jade,
when wonder turns to arithmetic and the dream becomes a bill,
when the falling star no longer asks for a whispered wish,
but only a name for burning rock passing through silent atmosphere.
The child in us is a butterfly caught beneath the glass of cold years,
beating its wings ever more slowly in the dusty display case of age,
we hear it sometimes whispering from the forgotten corner of our being,
a call as thin as the thread of smoke from a snuffed-out candle.
And we bury it beneath suits, beneath schedules, beneath stacks of paper,
beneath the grave faces worn to meetings like masks of wax,
forgetting that it held our hand through the forest without paths,
that it was the light that turned any stone into treasure.
But whoever still hears it singing in the depths of the dry well,
whoever opens its cage to let it fly through the windows of nature,
that one never dies, though the body turns to ash,
for they carry in their chest a child who dreams forever among the stars.
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