poetry All Night You Ask the Children of the World to Forgive You

The award-winning poet Julia B. Levine opens her eyes to global tragedies we leave for our children to inherit and our attempts still to shelter their innocence from what will haunt them.

Julia B. Levine Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight
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All Night You Ask the Children of the World to Forgive You

For polar melt, acid rain, the last blue whale.

For big box stores laid on top of bobcats,

wild iris, vernal pools, trackless skies.

And of course, for greed and envy,

rape and horror, the neighbor’s Hummer

parked over another angel of experience

busy sewing feathers

onto the thousands dead, the child soldiers,

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a young woman strapping her body to a bomb. 

And if not all night, at least once a week,

you ask for worldlight, sunlight,

the abundant longshot,

tease of unending delight,

slant fate of riches for them, for theirs,

for all the children, but especially

for this girl, your youngest

calling you out at dusk. 

On the cooling walk,

she crouches beside a black stray.

He purrs like a factory of pleasure.

Arches up to meet her palm.

She wants to know if it's just in movies

that cats drink milk.  

And then, out of nowhere, asks

Mom, I forget, what was nine eleven?

Do you answer?

Or rub behind the creature's ears,

down his thin back.

Look out at the street oaks

moving lazily in wind

and say, I don't remember.

Then all night ask the children of the world

to forgive you for cowardice,

passivity, the simple lie.

 

From _Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight_ by Julia B Levine. Louisiana State University Press, lsupress.org. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

 

Julia B. Levine has won numerous awards for her work, including the 2015 Northern California Poetry Award for her latest collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, as well as the 2003 Tampa Review Prize for her collection, Ask; the 1998 Anhinga Poetry Prize and bronze medal from Foreword magazine for her first collection, Practicing for Heaven, as well as a Discovery/The Nation award. Her work appears in several new anthologies, including The Places That Inhabit Us, The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She received a PhD in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley, and lives and works in Davis, California.