Rhapsode

This light reflecting light within a child’s face
approximates what they once called the holy.
Here at my son’s nursery school, squatting a chair
beside him, half a dozen lit like him
encircling our table, I am a celebrant.
Blue-smocked little priests, the boys and girls
hunch over their work to which my son invites me:
it is only the world they reshape out of their clay,
the cosmos’ three characters they smash, remake again:
a man, a woman, a snake this rolling pin
is handed me to imitate. All afternoon I do what I am told.
Meanwhile the radiance thickens toward rain
in the city outside, assuming I’ll return
the same man. I will. But smaller, I hope,
each instant knocking on the next one to let me in.