A small, unsmiling child,
Held upon her shoulder,
Stares from a photograph
Slightly out of kilter.
It slipped from a loaded folder
Where the income tax was filed.
The light seems cut in half
By a glum, October filter.

Of course, the child is right.
The unleafed branches knot
Into hopeless riddles behind him
And the air is clearly cold.
Given the stinted light
To which fate and film consigned him,
Who’d smile at his own lot
Even at one year old?

And yet his mother smiles.
Is it grown-up make-believe,
As when anyone takes your picture,
Or some nobler, Roman virtue?
Vanity? Folly? The wiles
That some have up their sleeve?
A proud and flinty stricture
Against showing that things can hurt you.

Or a dark, Medean smile?
I’d be the last to know.
A speechless child of one
Could better construe the omens,
Unriddle our gifts for guile.
There’s no sign from my son.
But it needs no Greeks or Romans
To foresee the ice and snow.