Probable Poem for the Furious Infant
Probably you’ll solve gravity, flesh
out our microbiomics, split our God
particles into their constituent bits
of christs and antichrists probably,
probably you’ll find life as we know it
knitted into nooks of the chattering
cosmos, quaint and bountiful as kismet
and gunfights in the movies probably,
probably, probably you have no patience
for the movies there in your eventual
arrondissement where you have more
credible holography, more inspiring
actual events, your ghazals composed
of crow racket, retrorockets, glaciers
breaking, your discotheques wailing
probably, probably, probably, probably
too late a sentient taxi airlifts you
home over a refurbished riverbank,
above the rebuilt cathedral, your head
dozing easy in the crook of your arm,
emptied of any memory of these weeks
we haven’t slept you’ve been erupting
into that hereafter like a hydrant on fire,
like your mother is an air raid, and I am
an air raid, and you’re a born siren
chasing us out of your airspace probably
we’ve caught 46 daybreaks in 39 days,
little emissary arrived to instruct us,
we wake now you shriek us awake,
we sleep now you leave us to sleep.
Copyright © 2019 by Jaswinder Bolina. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 10, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“In the early weeks of his life, our beloved newborn would only sleep soundly for 20-40 minutes at a time unless one of us was holding him. I must’ve walked three miles a night around our small apartment with him in my arms so my wife could catch a little sleep. When I got too exhausted, she’d sit up in bed holding him so I could catch some sleep of my own. The poem—or at least the idea for it—was born in the bleary daze of those long nights when I’d imagine his life forgotten of all of this, so many years in the speculative future, how in that future he might be resting so easily in his (hopefully) fulfilling life while we might be asleep more permanently somewhere else. There’s a lot of hope in it because there’s so much hopefulness in parenthood, but there’s also that ever-present sense of exhaustion and its hint of sadness too.”
—Jaswinder Bolina