The Poem I Found in My Daughter's Lunchbox
She's nine. She didn't write it for me.
I was packing her lunchbox the way I do every morning, the sandwich and the fruit and the note I always leave her, when I found the poem. It was on the back of the note I had written her the day before, a scribbled thing in her handwriting that was too small and too fast for me to read.
I read it anyway. It was about me.
It was not a good poem. It was about the way I hold a cup with both hands, like the warmth is the point. It was about the way I say her name when she is in trouble, the way the voice drops and the room gets quiet. It was about the way I am not always there when she wakes up, and the way she pretends not to notice.
She is nine, and she wrote a poem about me that was more honest than anything I have ever written about her. I write about her all the time, the way a parent does, and I have never been as honest as she was in that lunchbox.
I didn't tell her I found it. I put it back where I found it, in the lunchbox, under the sandwich, and I wrote her a new note, a different one, one that was not a poem but was trying to be honest. The poem is the thing she wrote for herself. The note is the thing I am trying to write for her.
She will be a better poet than I am. She already is. The poem in the lunchbox is the proof.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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