Advice to a son

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If I’d known how, I’d have iced your cakes

with princesses in pink, and unicorns;

with doll-size chairs and stairs, golden flakes

and sparkly angels standing by new-borns

of either sex, make no mistake.

I let others bring the trains and planes,

the football fields and swimming pools and blue

iced skies, green iced grass, streamers and chains

of boyishness, doll houses kept taboo.

Boys are trained early on as men.

But now that you’re a man, let me say

that manliness isn’t determined

by colours and the games that you play;

by being fierce like the sun, fast like the wind.

(And pink is totally okay.)

Especially, it’s not characterised

by what you choose to love, and who.

By cakes that are blocks and bricks when iced.

Doll-sized, sparkly things are manly too,

nothing of these need be despised.

Strength is manly, womanly as well,

and tears aren’t only for the weak;

the strength to love and to marvel,

the know-how to turn the other cheek

or not, to err towards too gentle.

It takes a very special sort of steel

to treat the weaker as an equal;

to fight injustice even as you feel

overwhelmed by the wholly brutal,

that is manly, that’s strength for real.

This is my earnest wish for you,

all my love in a tiny capsule

that you’ll learn to cherish and to value

every difference, and know when the rule

should be bent, and broken too.

And this my wish also, that you learn

all gaps needn’t be bridged, just respected;

your loving won’t get exact returns,

measure for measure always as expected,

it’s a gift, not open to trade terms.

When it’s over, all is said and done,

what’ll count will be the empathy,

how keenly attuned were your emotions.

Love’s the final index of happy -

the amounts got;  more crucial, those given.