The Child

Authors

poetry, childhood, memory, adulthood, responsibility

In this poem, a speaker who has tried for years to bury the child within him finds that child rising again whenever adult comforts fail.

Sal Cetrano

Sal Cetrano is a poet and former history teacher in the high schools of NYC, from which he retired with only flesh wounds and the odd night waking up screaming. Rare among Mailer’s friends, he was and is a conservative, a juxtaposition the two endlessly found both entertaining and instructive. His work has appeared, among other places, in California Quarterly, Negative Capability, Dalhousie Review, Poetry Wales, Pulpsmith, Kansas Quarterly, PRISM international, Kentucky Poetry Review andPoetry New Zealand. A regular at Mailer’s Gramercy Gym boxing club in the 1980s, he was born and raised in Brooklyn, but now resides in southern Florida, feeding the ducks and waiting on Jesus.