Girl of fifteen, <br />I see you each morning from my window <br />As you pass on your way to school. <br />I do more than see, I watch you. <br />I furtively draw the curtain aside. <br />And my heart leaps through my eyes <br />And follows you down the street; <br />Leaving me behind, half-hid <br />And wholly ashamed. <br /> <br />What holds me back, <br />Half-hid behind the curtains and wholly ashamed, <br />But my forty years beyond your fifteen? <br />Girl of fifteen, as you pass <br />There passes, too, a lightning flash of time <br />In which you lift those forty summers off my head, <br />And take those forty winters out of my heart.<br /><br />James Weldon Johnson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/girl-of-fifteen/
