terrypetersen

"Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?" 
Donna Tartt


Hate Mail

I see the twelve-year-old girl in my memory
as her mother holds a note left in their mailbox.
You are a baby and we hate you.
Two giggling girls, their mission accomplished,
run down the street. “They are jealous,” 
the mother of the twelve-year-old girl
 says in a tone unfamiliar to her daughter,
one that sounds protective, a sound that
doesn’t center on Ten-Commandment 
stoicism.  Did her mother suggest 
that maybe the taunting the preteen hears 
could be separated from social disaster?  
Since the family lives inside concepts, not hugs,
the girl stares, uncertain, into the narrow dead-end street.
She doesn’t know a possibility has been planted. She
will thank her mother fifty years later.