http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14437"The Babysitters"
Your mother was as nubile as a dressmaker's dummy;
your father polished his glasses and rubbed his crop.
When the Babysitter arrived, with her turquoise belt
and raw mouth, your father had never seen
such a fine wrist, such a way with an onion!
She pinned a plastic hummingbird
behind one pink ear; she sang Fever
over hardboiled eggs.
You, at nine,
had your curls sculpted with toothpaste. You hated
your friends: their Lego sets and down jackets.
But this Babysitter. She'd start with Goldilocks, then
veer. "Papa Bear said Someone has been eating my porridge!
And Goldilocks said My life is broken, my heart is over.
Snap my neck like a broccoli stalk."
Hear the Babysitter: brisk and newsy to the milkman.
You catch words like cream, coffee, cows; phrases like
my sister in Florida, 8 pounds 10 ounces,
a head of black down! But when she thinks herself
alone, you hear back seat of the car, then
with a trench knife, in the orchard. Secrets thud
like June bugs against screens,
and all you have to do is let them in.
One of the things I quite like about this poem is its emphasis on the power of the secret. How much does the "you" in the poem want to know about these things and how much does she want to know because they are secrets kept from her?
The situation (father, babysitter, pregnancy) is nothing new and though it might be argued that the hints are actually a case of misdirection and that such things are not going on(the ambiguity is one of the poem's strengths for me), the possibility of bad things, that children want to know these bad things, and that bad things are kept from children seems to be a perennial theme among literature of the last two hundred years or so.
It wasn't always like that.
There are times when I wonder if we're hurting children more because we keep such things from children rather than simply letting honesty be the best policy.
As a counter example,
by Theodore RoethkeMy Papa's Waltz
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/43.html
This is often used in classes as a near perfect example of form with content but the reaction today by students is one of anger. They see it as an example of child abuse.
I posted this poem at another site and got some strong reactions. My point was that the nostalgic reference point for the child and the "abuse" are in a sense both accurate. It is both and to focus on the negative, or the rhythm, or the nostalgia is to miss the richness of the poem itself.
In other words, it is meant to unsettle us as I think "The Babysitters" is meant to unsettle our preconceived ideas of right and wrong. To put it even more succinctly and perhaps even more trivially: you can't have one without the other.