an uncanny mixture of joy and fear, happiness and anxiety

It's a game we play. 

Well, as much a game as I can play with a one-year-old.

It goes like this.

When I come home from work,

he's there, toddling around the kitchen, wide-eyed

in his baby blue sleeping suit

with the padded feet.

When he sees me, he smiles, and I do too,

and I imagine the sound, the thud thud thud

of his tiny heart that I remember

from the last time we played our game.

I stoop down so my haunches almost touch the floor

and open my arms for a hug. He walks over

in his confident but uneasy way

and we are eye to eye when he breaks into laughter,

wraps his arms around my neck, and gently

nibbles on my shoulder. I do the same,

and it's then that I hear it, his hart

much faster than mine. After a minute or so

he turns around and walks out of my arms

only to turn around again and walk back,

laughing anticipating the hug

and, I think, the repetition. And again

I hear his heart, and again, momentarily,

an uncanny mixture of joy and fear,

happiness and anxiety overtakes me. 

It is I know, my pleasure in his life,

in his being here with us, and my fear

for him, for the difficulties yet to come.

But it is, also, a kind of self-pity;

the comfort of remorse that comes from imagining pain

juxtaposed against happiness, the permutations

of the future against the immediacy of the present,

the sound of his heart against the absence of it.

[Anthony Petrosky {1948- } 'Listening to My Son's Heart' from The Yellow Shoe Poets: Selected Poems 1964-1999]

(I chose this one for DG & the K-Bug.        xo     - A.)