“Halloween, 2023: A Poem”
It’s Halloween, and J and I are hand in hand. His other hand is
clutched tightly on a vacuum-sealed bag of cookies. A
few houses ago, his actual candy became too heavy for
him to carry, and he refuses to put the cookies out of sight.
Before the cookies, J sang odes to me as we walked by
ghouls, Jack-o-lanterns and other toil-and-trouble.
“I love chocolate,” He said, “I LOVE it.”
But now he’s switched muses.
“I love cookies,” He says, “I like the chocolate chips on top.”
He shakes the bag.
“Can you hear the cookies, Aunt Sarah?”
He shakes it again.
“Can you hear them?”
Next to his sister and her friends, he’s so small. His hand is
cold and like a penny I might forget in my pocket. But his
feeling are big and multitudinous. At every house, he
races after the other kids: “Wait for me! Wait for me!” At every
cauldron, he agonizes whether he’ll get candy he likes. And then,
when it’s time to walk next door, he runs: “Don’t forget me!”
So when he tells me about how much he loves
cookies, he does so with the gravity of all the
wisdom he’s collected during his three years on this
planet.
He shakes the bag.
“Can you hear the cookies, Aunt Sarah?”
And I think of all the things he’ll have to learn, but I’m so
glad he already knows what poetry is.
I hope he never forgets.