Our friends’ nine-year-old daughter asked
my wife the other day, Is hoe a bad word?
In these past few years we kinda blended
our families. To the children we’re Auntie
and Uncle. We have bonds beyond blood,
and certain privileges we can enjoy, like
taking the kids home after sleepovers.
So these questions arise from time to time:
cultural norms, biology, sometimes psychology,
plus spelling rules, homophones, semantics.
Lessons a native speaker can explain
better than one’s own parents,
especially if there’s a whiff of impropriety.
A younger sister, six-year-old Dominique,
asked her parent: Mama, am I black?
Her mama explained the facts to her,
apparently insufficiently, maybe
just too black and white.
So the little one countered,
I’ll ask Auntie.
As with most things though,
context matters.
Sometimes it’s other kids
on the playground; sometimes
it’s the music that filters through;
it’s almost always the daily news
from anywhere, really.
Kids pick things up, even at six.
Why do you ask, Dominique?
And from her soft sweet lips
the small hushed voice replies,
Because I don’t want to die.
About the author: Rob is a retired English teacher. He must have absorbed his stylistic leanings from so many years of exposure, though his interest in dabbling with words has always been with him. He currently edits the OLLI (senior college) arts and literature journal at the University of Southern Maine, and facilitates a poetry workshop there, as well. He’s been published in Sky Island Journal, The Blue Mountain Review, Eunoia Review, Renaissance Review and others, as well as in the anthology A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis. His first book of poems and essays, What Passes For a Life, is forthcoming from SCE Press. He lives in the present in Westbrook, Maine.