My daughter's getting stronger,
More surely holds herself
Day by day
She takes a few more steps
Before collapsing
In heaps of laughter
At her own success

My daughter's getting stronger,
Knows where she is
Smiles to see us,
Yells when we leave
She's grasped that things can both be and not.
She's learned how to hold things and
Let them drop.

My daughter's getting older.
Taking a finger she
Leads us slowly around the world,
Practising how to be free and tall,
While we learn to bend to stoop to crawl.

Newton would be proud.
Refuting the laws of gravity
My daughter shakes her head with the trees,
Falls backwards down stone stairs and cries,
Picks herself up off the floor again and flies

Every hour passing faster never coming back


Peter Jukes 1993

Our youth is like an ever open door
To a future we cannot follow

Our youth is like a long lost track
Down through the woods to the meadow

(How quickly it is overgrown
With no feet to clear the furrow!)

Our youth is like a shiny bright key
That opens the gates of sorrow.

Peter Jukes 1993

Great passion leads

To abstraction

W.B. Yeats

Desire is

not there or

then but in

remembering

Without saying good bye
People leave us,
Without saying good bye
Emotions go,

Without a bye or leave
The seasons pass
Like this:

Without saying good bye

2005 Peter Jukes:
translated (with help from Edyta Zalewska) from the Polish of Julia Hartwig