'Isn'T It Pretty? ' Poem by Ruth L. Rivers

We stand side by side and we are looking and she says to me “Isn’t it pretty? ”, and I nod once or twice but am lost, not on her thoughts, but far away on my own.
With an insistence and plea in her eyes she looks once more, jabbing her finger quite close but not in its range, speaking with little less question “Isn’t it pretty? ”, this time I sigh, knowing not really why, finally looking down at her small hands and face and smile.
Not looking back at me, still transfixed by the beauty, insisting now not to be affirmed but to be really heard, to be listened to in every sense of that word, she cries out with her child’s voice, and unbroken heart and mind, and unsullied child’s life, and everything truly organic in make of chemistry, “Isn’t it pretty? ! ”
I am there then with her, in her mind’s eyes, in her simple complexity, in her fluid uninterrupted breathing, smiling away in her pastel euphoric gaze, and I finally reply,
“Yes, …Yes, …It’s pretty.”


By Ruth L. Rivers
2-8-08