A Poem for Emily

By Miller Williams, Poet Laureate

Poem for Emily 

Small fact and fingers and 
farthest one from me, 
A hand's width and two 
generations away, 
In this still present I am 
fifty-three. 
You are not yet a single 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 some place 
else and thirty-three; 
Believing in sex and god 
and politics 
with children who look not 
at all like me, 

Some time I know you will 
have read them this 
so they will know I love 
them and say so 
and love their mother.

Child, what is 
is always or never was. 

Long ago,
a day I watched a while 
beside your bed, 
I wrote this down, a thing 
that might be kept 
a while, 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. 



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