Fifty Years & Other Poems/Girl of Fifteen
Girl of Fifteen
Girl of fifteen,I see you each morning from my windowAs you pass on your way to school.I do more than see, I watch you.I furtively draw the curtain aside.And my heart leaps through my eyesAnd follows you down the street;Leaving me behind, half-hidAnd wholly ashamed.
What holds me back,Half-hid behind the curtains and wholly ashamed,But my forty years beyond your fifteen?
Girl of fifteen, as you passThere passes, too, a lightning flash of timeIn which you lift those forty summers off my head,And take those forty winters out of my heart.