Nature and Nurture, a poem about parents and children

"The thoughtlessness, carelessness and cocksureness with which children are brought up is frightful to see: and yet everyone is essentially what they are to be when they are ten years old; and yet one would find that almost every one bears with them a defect from their childhood, which they do not overcome even in their seventieth year ..."

Kierkegaard, The Journals

Plasticine

My plasticine baby,

You have properties, chemical and physical,

Self –contained: the essence of what you are.

And in the sky there is your very own star -

Should anyone care to look for the mystical.

But plasticine is what you are: face fair,

Soft as putty, and you can be moulded,

Swaddled, coddled, groomed and folded, 

Shaped even by our very breath of air

That oh so gently presses in on your skin.

And you coo and we coo back to you.

Our voices are your echo, listen, listen.

We watch and our watching presses too.

Your love is blank, but we’ll fill it in

For you; cross the t’s and dot the i’s;

Tick the boxes for all that applies,

Make multiple choices, carbon copies, sign.

We wait and our waiting bears a weight;

Our thinking will become your thought,

A soft pushing this way and that:

We’ll make you square, or round or flat.

And our fingers, clumsy with wanting,

Might squeeze a shape misshapen in us;

And you’ll be a question, a puzzle, a rebus,

A conundrum beyond answering or solving.

So one day you too may feel misshapen,

As if parts of you are not you,

And the you you thought would happen

Will always be out of true.

And you thinking that’s what you are,

And you thinking you were made that way,

Crammed into the kiln and baked in clay,

Put onto the stage and told to star;

The mould cast, the role not chosen,

The shape pressed, and the lines written,

And what can you add but some flaws

And fluffs of your own? Effects a cause?

You’ll think you can escape the nurture,

Then find yourself twisted like a helix,

Find the faults we had secreted into the mix:

Do Not Admit that this is in your nature!

Oh, my plasticine baby,

Soft dough, kneaded with love and lust,

Baked in the hot oven of your mother’s womb,

Rising with the yeast of me, then dusted

With sugar, sweetened, ready for home;

And you’re a crusty loaf on a silver salver;

A cake, a confection, to be cut and sliced;

And we’ll all want a share, a piece, a bite.

The mouth waters, fills with saliva.

We’re gonna eat you up and spit you out.

The taste is obscene; you’re plasticine.

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A childhood poem, The Beauty of it

             

             

What we learn of life as children is absorbed one way or another, and then it seeps into our being,both consciously and unconsciously as we get older.  Sometimes we are aware when young of what we perceive to be wrong, not just childishly unfair but actually wrong; a small outrage to a morality we cannot define. This may, perhaps, enable us in later life to prevent its reoccurence in our own behaviour.  Not pass the baton on, for if we do, what we have and what we give is a life less lived.

The Beauty of it (continued)

A six-year-old walks a line

That may or may not exist,

Always teetering on the edge

Of ordinary temptation, nothing original,

Over a safety net sensed by instinct.

The fall brings knowledge,

Something not seen from above –

Not a test you were born to fail,

Nor an impulse you could never resist –

That being caught is a kind of love.

Not being caught is not knowing.

You can spend your life falling.

It’s not much of a life –

A life less lived.

Made to stand in the hall,

And told to strip,

His fingers fumble at button and zip –

Undoing himself – his body rocks;

His mind’s seismograph has stalled,

Cannot measure, has no scale -

The piss leaking from his toy cock

Puddles shame and fear on the floor.

He bends for the strap;

Then the shock tautens his frame,

And something gives, rips, snaps …

(“Catch me!”  She closes her eyes, drops…)

Flaps raggedly in the wind,

A twist of cloth caught on a fence crossed:

Something snagged, lost, left behind -

A hole around which his life is stitched.

His daughter picks at the threads;

Sews kisses, offers insteads.

Arms and legs wrapped around tight,

She whispers in his ear, “I knew you would.”

Still he wonders if he could,

And for how long he’ll bear the weight.

But the blue blue sky is a blanket.

Isn’t that the beauty of it?