My Parents
My parents kept me from children who were rough
Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes
Their thighs showed through rags they ran in the street
And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.
I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron
Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms
I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys
Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.
They were lithe they sprang out behind hedges
Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud
While I looked the other way, pretending to smile.
I longed to forgive them but they never smiled.
Copyright Credit: Stephen Spender, "My Parents" from New Collected Poems, published by Faber. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by kind permission of the Estate of Stephen Spender.
Source: Collected Poems 1928-1985 (Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1985)