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