Middle Age -- Pat Schneider

(Poem #33)Middle Age The child you think you don't want is the one who will make you laugh. She will break your heart when she loses the sight in one eye and tells the doctor she wants to be an apple tree when she grows up. It will be this child who forgives you again and again for believing you don't want her to be born, for resisting the rising tide of your body, for wishing for the red flow of her dismissal. She will even forgive you for all the breakfasts you failed to make exceptional. Someday this child will sit beside you. When you are old and too tired of war to want to watch the evening news,  she will tell you stories like the one about her teenaged brother, your son, and his friends taking her out in a canoe when she was five years old. How they left her alone on an island in the river while they jumped off the railroad bridge.  -- Pat Schneider