Donald Hall and Getting Older

I became an uncle last weekend. Not for the first time, but for the fourth. His name is Jack and while I was holding him for the first time I realized that it was also the first time that I wasn’t scared holding an infant. All I felt was a strange sort of peace, and the anxiety radiating off my niece while she patiently waited for her turn to hold her New Baby Brother. Looking into his face made me appreciate the passage of time on a greater scale. In him, in Jack, is the continuing history of the Caston family, a history that he will play a major part in defining. We all become bearers of history in some way or another, we continue to refine or redefine what it means to be the consequence of our past. All this rumination on legacy and family history led me to think of Donald Hall’s poem “My Son, My Executioner”. The poem is small and intimate, but captures the vast expanse of history that lays before us all, especially in our infancy.

“My Son, My Executioner”

My son, my executioner,

      I take you in my arms,

Quiet and small and just astir

And whom my body warms.

Sweet death, small son, our instrument

     Of immortality,

Your cries and hunger document

Our bodily decay.

We twenty-five and twenty-two

     Who seemed to live forever

Observe enduring life in you

And start to die together.

-Tim Caston