My family and I were in the car the other day driving through downtown LA to my cousin's wedding and the song "Never Grow Up" by Taylor Swift came on. I started thinking about how as adults, we sometimes get exasperated with the activity, the energy, the exhausting imagination, the "immaturity" in children. We sometimes seem to want them to incessantly stop asking "why" because we have a million things going on. We want this until they actually grow up, and then we want them to dream again, to be little, to imagine and to walk toward their sunflower family, their sabers and swords and bracelet handcuffs and twirling that is gone all too soon.
I wrote this poem as a tribute to that perfect imagination.
Maturity
Kaylee Brooks
They
wonder why the kitchen light bulb died and I try to avoid electrocution and say
it just did.
And
they ask and bask in their curious questions of
roly-polys
and dirt clods and doll dynasties and
it
just is, I say, because the internet is down and I don’t have time,
no
time,
to
look it up and discover dirt clods.
They
build forts of pillows and chairs and heavy, spilling books as staples;
watch
Mulan and mull over sabers, swords, strategies of heroism
and
I cringe as they twirl, and I say oh—it just is.
Twirling,
whirling, they are the ones who guard their
swiftly
flying swords.
Secret
strategies of how to reclaim the kidnapped doll
being
held hostage by the pirate child next door.
I
buy glasses to read recipes and elementary math but
when
they tell me of the sunflower family taking up residence in the garden,
my
glasses are not the proper prescription. Check them, doctor?
Bracelets
become handcuffs for the little thief who stole the teacup and
stop,
stop shrieking and scurrying about my feet!
Please.
And
then he, one of them, walks away one day from dragons and princesses
and
my prescription sees his tiny, aged face just fine as he gets bigger and I get
smaller, and I cry
as
I see him grow;
walking away from
his dynasty,
leaving
the sunflower family, Mulan and handcuffs,
walking towards
backpacks and textbooks and iphones;
as
I see him know
what
I thought I always knew:
it
isn’t just what I say, child.
