I hope it’s a boy,
of maybe fourteen,
having grown up in a family
that doesn’t read or perhaps
reads only popular books,
magazines like Sports Illustrated,
Cosmopolitan, the latest 
by James Patterson or Jude Deveraux.
I hope he’ll pause for a moment
wondering how such a thin book
hopes to hold its own
between hundreds of pages
of romance or war.
I hope he’ll pull it out thinking
how much like himself it is
caught between heroic
brother, popular sister.
I hope the lines remind him
of what he saw of Whitman
and Emerson in school recently 
and how he thought they made 
some sense despite his classmates’
insistence they were at best
idealistic, at worst simply boring.
I hope he’ll read one or two and then
another and another and so on
for close to an hour
before looking up, expecting
with a certainty he has never felt before
the world to be changed.