Children of the Earth and Sky and My Heart

"To My Children Out in the Wide Wide World"

What I have feared

is not that the

world or the social
safety nets set by
prior generations would

somehow fail you or that

nuclear or even nucular warfare
or accident would bring human
civilization to some dramatic and
precipitous conclusion. What
disturbed me was not the
rising cost of gasoline or college
or the inexorable rise of ocean
shorelines or the imperturbable rise
of China. I spent no more hours
trying to understand why women in
Baghdad and Aceh and Bulaq
al Dakrur would choose to wear
burkas on sunlit mornings than
wondering why those in Chicago
and Taos and Salem would choose
repeatedly to bed the same men
who just beat them. And how
could I sincerely feel distressed
about violent threats of Islamist
fanatics when I'd heard rooms of

plump, pompous Protestants

invoking God to bless the

slaughter by sword or

starvation of Muslims? No.

I can't worry about these
small things. It's a big, wide
world out there beyond this
bedroom with your white
bassinets, and I worried
as I rocked you, as I
fed you, as I taught you
manners and language and
confidence that you somehow
might not get to know how
high is the sky how wide the
sea how deep the hearts that
will hold you wherever you
go. Now you are gone so
very far away, and I am
sitting, I am knitting, not
dropping a stitch, in case the
wide wide world ever becomes
small enough and close enough

that you can see me again.