Links

Here is a truth we can easily see:
childhood is an inherited disorder,
a genetically transmitted pathology.
Generations meet across the great divide
 with no sense of the pain hidden by that border,
and the suffering each causes, or shares, is denied.

Deep in hock to the future, and to the past just as much,
 parents’ preoccupations become dense,
gazing over the kids’ heads, out of touch.
But down at waist level and below
 kids live life in the present tense,
and see far more than their parents know.

They notice when parents withhold affection,
 seeing every evasive withdrawal,
and somewhere they register each petty rejection.
These repeat, become habit, and each child makes their own
 promise to themselves never to fall.
But as time passes, and with our own kids grown,

we hear ourselves speaking in our parent’s voice.
 So we change places, but we keep our own pain,
finding new ways to do what was done to us.
‘Down to the fourth generation’, as the old book says.
 Try as we might, we are links in a chain.
Childhood persists; only the body decays.