Poem: Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children

From The Writer’s Almanac for today. I am enjoy­ing receiv­ing it in my email.

Poem: “Say­ing Good­bye to Very Young Chil­dren,” by John Updike
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/updike.htm, from Amer­i­cana and Oth­er Poems (Knopf).

Say­ing Good­bye to Very Young Children

They will not be the same next time. The sayings
so cute, just slight­ly off, will be corrected.
Their eyes will be more skep­ti­cal, plugged in
the more secure­ly to the world­ly buzz
of tele­vi­sion, alpha­bet, and street talk,
cul­ture pol­lut­ing their gazes’ dawn blue.
It makes you see at last the val­ue of
those bor­ing aunts and neigh­bors (their smells
of sum­mer sweat and cig­a­rettes, their faces
like shapes of sky between shade-giv­ing leaves)
who knew you from the start, when you were zero,
coo­ing their noth­ings before you could be bored
or knew a name, not even you own, or how
this world brave with hel­los turns all goodbye.