'May the Days Be Worthy of Your Wonder'

The young couple across the cul-de-sac from us have just had their third child, a son this time. The neighborhood has always been rich in children. When we moved in fourteen years ago, sixteen kids lived here in the street’s nine houses. Twelve of them were boys. Now there are seventeen kids, even with our three sons living in Maryland, Peru and Westchester County. None of the current crop appears to be a delinquent. They’re noisy, of course, and forever riding bicycles and scooters. One kid even has an e-bike. I had forgotten that children always run if they have a choice in the matter, and yelling is the language they speak. 

We hear the fertility rate in the United States – the number of children born to women of childbearing years – reached a record low in 2024 and dropped even lower last year. I don’t claim to understand the economics or sociology of this trend. It just seems sad. Children are difficult and exhausting but they make everything worthwhile. When you have a child, you’re forced to relinquish your fiercely held self-centeredness and live for another being. You have something you would gladly give up your own life to keep safe.

 

Yvor Winters and his wife, the poet/novelist Janet Lewis, had a son and a daughter. Winters concludes his poem “A Prayer for My Son” with these lines:

 

“Eternal Spirit, you

Who guided Socrates,

Pity this small and new

Bright soul on hands and knees.”

 

Daniel Mark Epstein published another blessing poem, “Caesarean,” in the Winter 1998 issue of The American Scholar. Note the final three lines:

 

“Startled from ancient sleep in a dark house

By crashing walls, harsh torches, strangers

Dragging him naked through his mother's blood,

No hero would stand up to the invaders

With such intrinsic dignity as you showed

This morning, the first day of your life.

At the shock of air you cried out loud

In sight of a new world and a world lost.

Then you were quiet, curious, engrossed,

Blue eyes half-open bearing a ripple of light

From that primordial ocean cast asunder.

May your vision never weary of the sight

Of this strange country and our stranger ways;

And may the days be worthy of your wonder.”