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.

click here to watch the film on youtube