A Poem for a Thursday #183

Miller Williams was an American poet, translator, and editor. He lived from1930-2015. Williams won several awards and published over 25 books. Former president, Bill Clinton, chose him to read a poem at his second inauguration. According to an article in The New York Times, “Mr. Williams was allergic to pretension and what he once called “coyness” in poetry. In an interview with The Oxford American, he proudly recounted the time the singer, Hank Williams Sr. told him over drinks at a gas station in Lake Charles, La, that he had “a beer-drinking soul.”

Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me,
a hand's width and two generations away,
in this till present I am fifty-three.
You are not yet a full day.

When I am sixty-three, when you are ten,
and you are neither closer nor as far,
your arms will fill with what you know by then,
the arithmetic and love we do and are.

When I by blood and luck am eighty-six
and you are someplace else and thirty-three
believing in sex and god and politics
with children who look not at all like me,

sometime I know you will have read them this
so they will know I love them and say so
and love their mother. Child, whatever is
is always or never was. Long ago,

a day I watched awhile beside your bed,
I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept
awhile, to tell you what I would have said
when you were who knows what and I was dead
which is I stood and loved you while you slept. 

A Poem for Emily
Miller Williams