Poem of the Day
Study of Children
By Asha Futterman
did you know
that you all work for me?
I asked them as a joke
did you know
that you all work for me?
I asked them as a joke
Late in this cruel season when the sun
scourges alike the city and the fields,
parching the stubble and sinking into slums
One might say your gaze is veiled in thickish fog:
Your mysterious eye (is it blue? or gray? or green?)
Is alternately tender, reverent, and cruel,
Stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lust
torment our bodies and possess our minds,
and we sustain our affable remorse
Dreams come now, bad dreams, and teenage boys
burrow into their pillows. Now the lamp
that glowed at midnight seems, like a bloodshot eye,
I prize the memory of naked ages when
Apollo relished gilding marble limbs
whose agile-fleshed originals achieved
You used to be jealous of our old nurse
who sleeps, warm heart and all, beneath the sod.
We ought to bring her flowers, even so.
Call it windfall
finding your calculation
come, finally,
Two events have a spacelike separation.
Show that a frame can be found in which
the two events occur at the same time.
They were the decisive icy fingers
of geology class brought home, stretching
into the parkway.
They are all happy over their very good number,
an easy square; its root, six,
itself a lovely number, exponential chrysalis.