Geoff Page: Two Poems
On Cuteness
Each language has a word for it,
separately invented.
Lorenz established babies need it
simply to be fed.
Puppies have it in abundance,
small and wobbly, well-disposed.
Toddlers who are cute themselves
can recognise their simulacra.
“Isn’t she a little cutie?”
the world must sing in unison,
encountering the mother
stopping on a street.
Teddy bears are said to have it
but never quite succeed.
Almost everyone who’ll read this
once was cute but is no longer.
So where does all that cuteness go?
Mostly, it is handed down,
sibling through to sibling.
She who steals big sister’s share
will never be forgiven.
Bossiness is all that’s left.
Kings Cross may offer minxiness
but that’s another word.
Cute can be pejorative—
the “don’t you come all cute with me!”,
the “wasn’t she too cute by half?”—
but that is not the granddaughter
burbling in a stroller or
grandson who, with backwards smile,
crawls towards the door
or tries his undecided legs
from chair to chair to chair.
The news can tell us how things are.
Cuteness, how they ought to be.
I’m told of thieves who won’t steal cars
with soft toys in the rearview window.
I like to think of terrorists,
all padded up with TNT,
dissuaded by a pram.
Second Sunday
“I don’t approve of it at all,”
my mother liked to say,
dismissing all its commerce as
a sad naiveté.
“Life, my lad, is all endurance—
so make the best of it.”
She had no time for ribboned flowers
“and all the rest of it”.
She would accept my phone call though,
a much less silly thing,
while noting how, from all her brood,
I was “the last to ring”.
Geoff Page
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