A poem for Maxine Kumin

Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses

More ladylike than we have ever been?
But they moan about their aging more than we do,
In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.

They moan about their aging more than we do,
A somber group--why don’t they brighten up?
Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity
The beg us to be dignified like them

As they ignore our pleas to brighten up.
Someday perhaps we’ll capture their attention
Then we won’t try to be dignified like them
Nor they to be so gently patronizing.

Someday perhaps we’ll capture their attention.
Don’t they know that we’re supposed to be the stars?
Instead they are so gently patronizing.
It makes us feel like children--second-childish?

Perhaps we’re too accustomed to be stars.
The famous flowers glowing in the garden,
So now we pout like children. Second-childish?
Quaint fragments of forgotten history?

Our daughters stroll together in the garden,
Chatting of news we’ve chosen to ignore,
Pausing to toss us morsels of their history,
Not questions to which only we know answers.

Eyes closed to news we’ve chosen to ignore,
We’d rather excavate old memories,
Disdaining age, ignoring pain, avoiding mirrors.
Why do they never listen to our stories?

Because they hate to excavate old memories
They don’t believe our stories have an end.
They don’t ask questions because they dread the answers.
They don’t see that we’ve become their mirrors,

 We offspring of our enormous children.

Carolyn Kizer (1925-2014) was an American poet who wrote largely from a feminist perspective expressed through references to mythology and history. She also took a strong interest in science and the natural world in her poems, and she was a noted translator of Japanese and Chinese poetry. Kizer had published a poem in The New Yorker when she was 17 years old, but she embraced her vocation as a poet more seriously after she attended a poetry workshop offered by poet Theodore Roethke, In 1959, she helped found the literary journal Poetry Northwest, and served as its editor until 1965, when she became the first director of Literary Programs for the newly formed National Endowment for the Arts