Poems

Philip Terman, professor of English and Creative Writing at Clarion University in Pennsylvania, has written a new book of poems — Book of the Unbroken Days. There are quite a few poems in the book that he wrote about his two daughters adopted from China.

Poem for Our Daughter

Philip Terman

We didn't know how a small child —
thirty inches, twenty-five pounds, could delight us

in the way she draws us out of the misery
we thought was waiting for us, the heaviness
of our bodies, the brittling of our bones,
the abandoned strands of hair, the puffed
edges around the eyes, each ache and crack —

we didn't know that solitude was simply a condition,
that we could peek beyond the walls of ourselves
and discover this other kind of life, asking to be lifted up,
demanding us out of our concerns,

now that we are brought back to our birth beginnings,
reminded of our exotic origins,
and our faithlessness can be banished,
with all our dreams of absence, our desires to sink deeply
into our own misery.
and we need no longer think so seriously of our own deaths,
or believe in the great Nothingness that comes after,
the broken generations, the windows of emptiness:

Oh you who have entered our lives as if through a secret door
and brought to us your wholly other world
and are teaching us the language of your millennium,

before you arrived we renounced miracles
and disregarded whatever might happen in the next life,
we reveled in the comfort of our own skin and bones,
and shunned absolute beauty into the Book of Myth.

We thought purity, as in laughter, was a concept,
immediacy an idea, innocence a theological speculation.

We thought each of our responses had to be gauged,
our words tempered, our singing muted,
we thought our happiness had to be justified,
spontaneous gestures inhibited, we believed
we were too old to simply babble,

too refined to manipulate our faces into absurd expressions,
contort infantile positions out of our stiff frames.

Slowly objects are once again becoming unfamiliar.
We are reminded how every moment we remake the world.

If you would like to order the book, please contact Dr. Terman directly. (Poem posted with permission.)