The Book-Child

You spend your days and nights shaping it into

something approaching perfection. Or, if not perfection,

helping it live up to its potential – an extra comma

here, a colon there, maybe a sentence or two to be deleted. 

This thing means something. It’s part of you. You wake up

at 4am – has it transmogrified without your knowledge?

You open up the document and give it another read.

It’s just as you left it. Back to bed. Come the morning

you know its safe, sleeping soundly in its little folder.

But potential means the big wide world, that frisson of

getting older. Maybe others won’t gift it quite the same love,

won’t understand it as you do, won’t see it as worthy of

quite the same stakes. That’s the risk you have to take. 

You can’t keep your baby at home forever. You have to

let paper wings fly. You have to kiss them goodbye.

Joshua Seigal