so quick

Isabel Is One








so quick with the eye,
so quick with the smile,
so quick with the wail
when the world denies her what she wants
or she just feels out-of-sorts,

these days now she wants the best friend around,
her mother, or her father,
who knows her and she knows the knowing,
who she knows and she knows the knowing,










without words to let us know what she needs,
to comfort her in their explanation of what is
and how long what she wants to be will be,
or why it won’t,
she’s thrown back in feeling as FEELING,
with all the prodigious power of her intellect
hijacked into service to her emotions,
she knows the moment and throws herself
into expressing the loss or the hope,

she roughly patterns what she hears and sees
and hopes the broad stroke of a sound,
a face, the cast of the eye,
can be read right by the adults around her,

I love her openness, her smile,
the joy so easy to read and to reinforce,

we dance to the twinkle in her eye
and do our best to deal with the furrow of her brow,
and the despair of her cry.

by Henry Walker
July 27, ‘09