My God how we all swiftly, swiftly
unwrap our lives, running from
one rummaged secret to the next
like children among their birthday stuff --
a shout, a half-heard gasp here
and for a while bliss somewhere else
when the one thing we asked for all year
is really there and practically as perfect
as we knew it would be. Those beckoning passes
into what's ahead: first words, the run
without a fall, a bike, those books,
a girl whose nakedness is endless in our bed,
and a few public stunts with results that
partly please us. And on we go, my God how
restlessly among glimpsed profiles turning and
undarkening towards us as we reach them -- praiseworthy
the ones who'll press on with this, press on
so long and so often wrong, hoping to prove
some of the children right.
Coles, Don. "How We All Swiftly" Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology of Poems in English. Jones, Evans and Todd Swift, eds. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2010. 89.
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