Poetry

I have been meaning to post my two favorite poems on children and parenting which I came across as an undergrad several years ago:

My Son My Executioner

My son my executioner,
I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir,
An whom my body warms.

Sweet death, small son, our instrument
of immortality,
Your cries and hungers document
Our bodily decay.

We twenty-five and twenty-two,
Who seemed to live forever,
Observe enduring life in you
And start to die together.

by Donald Hall (published in To Read a Poem)

On Children

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's
longing for itself.
They come through you but not from
you,
And though they are with you yet they
belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not
your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not
their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of to-
morrow, which you cannot visit, not even
in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek
not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries
with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your chil-
dren as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path
of the infinite, and He bends you with His
might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand
be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

by Kahlil Gibran (excerpted from The Prophet)