W.H. Auden Was (Not) My Babysitter
W.H. Auden & I were alive together for 19 days.
We never met, what with me
being a baby
& him being a famous poet.
Plus he was living in Austria at the time
& I was in Massachusetts,
so even if he’d wanted to hold a baby
he would have had other options closer to hand.
I would have liked to have been held by Auden.
It would be a fun story to tell the few people in my life who know who he was.
“Yeah, W.H. Auden used to come over to our place and cradle me in one arm
while he read me the poems he held in his other hand. No big deal.”
Instead my father read me the newspaper,
sitting in an overstuffed chair with his infant son,
a beer on the lamp table beside him.
/ / /
23 March 2022
Latham NY
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