This is a new poem.
And it's called, "Children."
"What good are children anyhow?
They only break your heart.
The one that bore your fondest hopes
will never amount to anything.
The one you slaved to give the chances you
never had rejects them with contempt.
They won't take care of you in your old age.
They don't even write home.
They don't follow in your footsteps.
They don't avoid your mistakes.
It's impossible to save them from pain.
And, of course, they never listen.
Remember how you hung on the lips
of your father or grandfather, begging for the old stories?
'Again!
Tell it again.
What was it like in olden times?'
We have good stories, too--
funny, instructive, pathetic.
Forget it.
Write them down for your friends, your friends with whom
you have that unspoken pact.
Don't ask me about my children.
And I won't inquire of yours.
Remember how we used to exchange instant pictures, how
we boasted of cute sayings, how we--
forget it.
Put away those scrapbooks with the rusted flute in the closet,
with the soiled ballet slippers.
Tear up the clumsy valentines.
Tear up every crayon scrap that says, 'I love you, mama.'
They don't want us to keep these mementos.
They find them embarrassing, those relics of dependent love,
that orange crayon that didn't dare write, 'I hate you.'
Forget their birthdays as they forget yours, perhaps
because they never finish anything--
not a book, not a school.
Their politics are cruel and sentimental.
Some monster of depravity who destroyed millions
with his smile is a hero to them.
Now he smiles benignly from their walls.
Because they are historyless.
They don't believe in history.
Stalin wasn't so bad.
The Holocaust didn't really happen.
Roosevelt was a phony.
But the worst of it is, they don't believe we ever believed.
They don't believe we ever had ideals.
They don't believe that we were ever poor.
They don't believe that we were ever passionate,
or that we are passionate today.
Forget it.
Don't torture yourself.
You still have some life to salvage.
Get divorced.
Go on a diet.
Take up the career you dropped for them 20 years ago.
Go back to the schools they deserted
and sign up for courses.
Study tranquility, one on one.
Take meditation.
And roll for renewal.
Remember those older friends we used to envy,
brilliant and glittering; the beauty
who refused to have children, not
about to sacrifice their careers; who refused the mess,
the entrapment, as we toiled over chores
and homework, worried about measles and money?
Have you seen them lately?
They no longer converse in sparkling cadenzas.
They're obsessed with their little dog
who piddles on their Oriental rug, who
throws up on the bedspread.
They don't notice his bad breath.
His incessant yapping doesn't seem to disturb them.
To be honest about it, the whole apartment smells.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
And the way they babble to him in pet names instead of talk
of Milton, Chaucer, Dante.
The way they caress him makes you fairly ill,
the way they call him 'baby.'" Thank you.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]