Girl of Fifteen by James Weldon Johnson — Read

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.