From American Life in Poetry

The US Poet Laureate, 2004-2006, Ted Kooser has a weekly column where he chooses a poem he finds that shares one poet's unique view of our American life as refracted through poetry's prism. This arrives in my inbox every Thursday; sometimes whimsical, sometimes tragic, and others, such as this poem, which are surprisingly close to my experience of watching my daughter play and eat.

Enjoy!

To Katharine: At Fourteen Months

All morning, you've studied the laws
of spoons, the rules of books, the dynamics
of the occasional plate, observed the principles
governing objects in motion and objects
at rest. To see if it will fall, and if it does,
how far, if it will rage like a lost penny
or ring like a Chinese gong--because
it doesn't have to--you lean from your chair
and hold your cup over the floor.
It curves in your hand, it weighs in your palm,
it arches like a wave, it is a dipper
full of stars, and you're the wind timing
the pull of the moon, you're the water
measuring the distance from which we fall.

--Joelle Biele