WHAT I HOPE FOR YOU

WHAT I HOPE FOR YOU

To Lazadae

I hope you think of me as that guy

with the warm chest you slept on for hours

your first night alive in room 2506

of Emanuel’s family wing, but I hope

I never remind you of that, Lazadae, like when

you’re 16 and you steal a knife from the mall

kiosk because your mother used to steal things

like that when she was 16 and you have

petty thrill-based theft in your genes.

After we bring you home from the backroom

security where men discussed your permanent

record, I hope I don’t say something trite

like reminding you what a traumatic experience

your birth was, how your mother labored

at home for three days until your bowels

began to empty inside of her and we drove

in dark quiet to the hospital where she was

numbed then splayed open on the surgical slab,

her bladder pushed aside so two rubbered hands

could thumb you out and away from all you knew

of wet warmth, and how you were upside down

from how you should have been, breech,

wanting to enter the world with your toes

in your mouth. I hope I don’t tell you about the surgeon

handing you off under white lights to a woman

who was not your mother who scrubbed the blue

from your skin, cleared your lungs of all

you could not cough during birth. And I hope

I don’t remind you how you didn’t cry until I put

my hand on your limp arm and said through my surgical

mask, You’re here, Lazadae,

calling you the name that came to your mother

in a dream when you were just a splitting cell,

when she dreamt of pulling a tray of lasagna

from our oven and told me in the morning

she thought she was pregnant, then made up a word

over tea, Lazadae. The name waited for you there

in the operating room, stained my lips red as I said it

over and over and you cried first breaths. I hope

when people ask what kind of name is Lazadae

you tell a story all your own, flex your wild thumbs

and say it involves unicorns, forest nymphs, that Laz

means this and dae means that and with the unstressed

ah in the middle your name is a dactyl, perfect for a poem.

And if you shorten your name I hope you do better

than some text-generation moniker like LZA LOL

because, Lazadae, I hate that stuff. But I hope

you don’t care what your father likes or hates, and when

you don't care I hope I don't care. But I will, Lazadae.

I’ll care, but still hope you bloom into a creature

beyond your mother and me, that your legs grow long,

your eyes speak poems, your mind never takes a thing as truth

because someone says so. I hope your whole generation

is like this, Lazadae, that you and all your breech brethren

born in the dark of April in the year of the Rabbit

untangle the metaphors from the Psalms,

that you bury the nails of war, burn all currency

until you achieve a clan of rarefied vision. But I hope you don’t

try to do any of that, Lazadae, not if you wish to blend, be a girl

with pink gum in her hair, sleep with a baseball glove, find love

long before you’re old enough to know it hurts. More

than anything, Lazadae, I hope you know that songs live

in the sway of leaves and shadows, that the sounds you make

as you feed at your mother are music, that your mother’s voice

is melody, that I am merely a flute, and that you, Lazadae,

are the wind, the drum, the rhythm of new hot blood.

- Dave Jarecki