The Child Knows

A poem about innocence and danger that imagines the child as already reading the violence, risk, and bravado of the adult world.

The poem keeps a folk-ballad energy while moving toward a stranger, more vertical idea of destiny.

A short, ballad-like poem cataloguing ways of being and adventuring: 'How you talk / How you sin / How you walk / With a gun in your hand / Better with a horse and a lasso'. It dares the open sea ('You gotta chose the violent ship'), the Poles, and a hobo's trek 'Like from Pittsburgh to Australia', and ends in a vertical cosmology - 'Most people have not seen God' yet you 'end up where Heaven is vertical'.

What 'the child knows' is offered as a string of choices and dares rather than a single lesson - the poem reads like a boy's mythic itinerary, ranking the cowboy's 'horse and a lasso' above 'a gun in your hand' and prizing self-reliant journeys 'Both on your own so cool / Between the Earth and sky'. Its three-beat lines and plain rhymes give it a nursery-rhyme surface laid over restless, slightly dangerous content (violence, hoboing, the unseen God). The geographic leaps - Poles, oceans, 'Pittsburgh to Australia' - render childhood knowledge as appetite for the whole world, and the closing image of Heaven as 'vertical', reached by going 'streight up', turns travel into ascent. The poem trusts the child's instinct that the real route to the divine is upward and earned by going it alone. Preserve source spellings 'chose', 'streight'.