Drifting away from ma....

Thank you Mr A for reminding me of this poem and making me cry. 
I found it and I remember we did this at school when we were kids, it means a lot more to me today than back then....it took a few years but I finally understand it! 


Walking Away was published in 1962. C Day-Lewis dedicated this poem to his first son and recalls a day when he was watching him go in to school. 

- Walking Away - 

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –

A sunny day with leaves just turning,

The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play

Your first game of football, then, like a satellite

Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away

Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,

Has something I never quite grasp to convey

About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching

Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still.  Perhaps it is roughly

Saying what God alone could perfectly show –

How selfhood begins with a walking away,

And love is proved in the letting go.

Jameson Memorial Hall

Your lack of experience scares me my child but ... love is proved in the letting go.

I love you.