From within the confines
of our narrowly concepted
rituals of the insular good,
we love to love babies
we love to pity children
we love to forget young adults
and we love to blame their parents.

How quickly we forget
or choose to ignore,
from the safety of
acceptance & comfortability & choice
that we once
loved & pitied & forgot
every parent we ever blamed.

How quickly we forget
or never realized
how our sunny dispositions
to judge
blind us so easily
from the facts.

For example, we know
that babies really do prefer the sound of
their mother’s voice
above all others,
that they cry in the accent of their mother’s tongue,
because her voice reverberated
down, so perfectly
into that protected capsule.
That in their glassy-eyed stare,
they see us
in a way no one else ever will.
That fetal brains
are evolutionarily genius
in the way they grow and adapt
to the threats of stress or scarcity
in ways that will shape the
rest of their lives.

We know, for example,
that children are lanterns of consciousness
looking and learning in all directions
at once.
As helpless, dependent beings
they are subconsciously
conducting experiments
and using conditional probability,
reading the complexity of human emotion,
and connecting through language
to piece together their realities.

And so, they exist,
Brilliant and Dependent,
until the impendent time
when we cast them
Worthless and Independent,
ready (or not) to plant
ready (or not) to grow
the next season of seeds.

In spite of our ignorance
and condescension
we will, eventually,
embrace 0-3
only to realize
that it was misadvertised.
That humans do not exist in disparate
parts.
They cannot, like legos,
be constructed in an orderly
fashion,
but, like everything else
on this Earth,
love and grow
wholly
with the cycles of the sun
and the universe.

It is not wrong,
but it is not enough
until we decide, instead,
on that infinite loop
from now until death
over and over
again.