You mustn’t forget to wake them up, just before the daylight peeks.
Shake them thinly, as you should have the welcome mat last night.
If they fuss or stir, twitch the drapes apart, that’ll burn their freckled cheeks for certain
The draft may pick at their skin, gambling on the morning, but don’t allow them to stretch for their duvets.
If you must, crack the bay wide, so they expect the birds
They will be at the pane like passengers
Oh, how they love to hear them sing
They whistle heavy,
As if each had picked up and swallowed a smoldering coal.
Their throats singed and swollen with song.
Their clumsy bodies will fall out of trance and scamper to the downstairs,
where their cold feet will scuff the splintered floorboards.

Dress them,
She loves those chalky gloves, although soiled from the dirt in the garden
And wrinkled near the palm where she wet them in the stream north from the Church
while attending to our laundry
But still hold them.
For I have found every winter when I hold them from trembling
That they grow.

Be sure he doesn’t skip his tie
He will whine, whimper, and whale
But the trees are dressing in new robes and shedding their old ones, as they did the last spring
and as they do he must.
be patient with them
they are just now learning how to control their rampant thoughts,
to set obtrusive thoughts aside, and replace them with nimble ones.
It takes a grown child to do big things.
Often they have no thoughts to push against,
they will find themselves questioning if a thought can truly be theirs
if they are not currently thinking it.
So help them understand.
Make sure their hubris is controlled as well.
Speaking of...
Teach them
There are two sides to any argument;
one arm in each sleeve.
As the days go by, you will with them… as I did.
It’s not all Romeo and Juliet.
No Shakespeare sonnets nor Homer.
Hate crimes and political assassinations
Birds living in their city-states, that would give anything,
even a rattled wing, to become suddenly symbolic.
Never let them live a day believing that they are not.
The mirror you will hold will be too small for the swans.

She likes the novel by our bedside table, with binding decrepit and  pages stained with rings and candle wax.
He can’t help but listen and savor despite his protests.

Never let my fondness waver, I knew it must have been toilsome.
For those times where all they could hear from me was
How I could barely hear the schoolboy priest that spoke with a monocle down his throat
How my chest was always sore despite the medicine
How the telephone was a ridiculous invention
How harsh the winter would be, because of the height of the bird’s nests
How relieved I was to be sitting.
I heard one afternoon he ask you “Why so still?”
You responded, “She’s tired.”
“Aren’t you?” his eyes wide and silky
It was as if I could hear your heartening beam, brush those freckled cheeks.
He then entered our drab chamber that next morning as I tightened my boot laces.
He held my hand with both of his and asked
“Do we make you tired?”

That next winter, I decided it was time for my departure,
They are so wise, yet remote
But when the stalking shade of fear falls
You must be near.
You, the unstable one, must become the tree
In whose grows to unending heights of flowering green.
In which hangs every fruit, that hang silver chimes.
Roots that go deep and thick
Strong, solace bark
To love and to cherish
While I am gone.