Category: Babies

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Embrace

The baby imprints
her face to your face
forehead to forehead,
mouth to mouth, blowing raspberries on
any soft part of you.

Embrace fleshiness
thick legs strong.
Carry the four-year-old on your back,
the one-year-old on your hip.

Your arms
surround these children
who press themselves
into your body.
Boundless love,
a great acceptance of you
as you are right now:
disheveled, mussed, tired,
unsung in any circle
but this one.

—Lara Payne
 

First appeared in SWWIM Every Day. Used by permission of the poet.

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The Wordless: The Unspoken and Unnamed

At six months pregnant, the limits of language make me cry
about every sound: all the lowing cellos—sounds strung up

on laundry lines, displayed like underwear flapping itself crisp
and unopening, how the bow moves like wind across strings—

every tinny brass—beaten into my palms, stalled and toed
up my arms. I don’t play an instrument, but I’m missing

words to explain how every sound feels, how it feels
to grow another woman inside me, how to explain God—
          mostly that—

and the child with my hair and eyes I’ll never someday have. How
can sadness mean all this? The words, nameless as the Water-
          Drawers,

the Damsels, the 10 Concubines of David—all the unworded
          women,
unmouthed and untounged mothers and daughters. Some word
          must

exist to give language to all the women who exist only in the
          sigh and struggle—
the shuffle on of boots in lingering lines—all those lost to silence.

—Allison Blevins, from A Season for Speaking

 
Seven Kitchens Press. Used with permission of the poet.

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Growing Season

Too much spring rain.
The gutters burst
with hundreds of miniature maples.
They have germinated
in their own rotting pods
and stretch their leaves
to the sun. Yank them out,
I tell my husband,
before the neighbors talk.
He climbs a ladder,
cuts the stems loose
with a trowel.

Outside Beijing, the mother
of our next child
digs all day, hair sweeping
the fine soil where black seeds
roll from her fingers.
More drought, they warn,
but she plants anyway,
for you never know
when a storm will hit.
Today, row markers and dirt.
Tomorrow, plump cabbages
glistening on the table.

—Tania Runyan, from Simple Weight, FutureCycle Press
 
 

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Cooking Class, Illinois, Mid 70s

Along her immaculate counter: silo
of red-handled sifter, bright order
of silver spoons, lemon bales of butter

softening in late winter light. In cupboards
her husband the carpenter built, bars
of Baker’s Chocolate, dried figs, quartered

apricots and Mason Jars of brined harvest.
A good cook puts up her hair, wears
apron, stores flour in freezer to keep

Boll Weevils out, uses shells of her egg
as a tool to separate yolk from white.
She also wears dresses, I learned

when, for donning jeans, she informed me
she no longer wished me to babysit. She cited,
over the phone to my mother, the effect

it might have on her son, the kind of wife
he might choose, the man he’d become
as I chased him on my hands and knees round

the living room’s glass table she refused to move
when he was born. He’d learn, she’d said, he’d learn
soon enough, where he stopped and she began.

— Tania Pryputniewicz, from Casual: A Little Book of Jeans Poems & Photos, T. S. Poetry Press

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Anyday

Wash some dirty dishes
Gather up rumpled clothes
Diaper a soft pink bottom
Change the sheets
Pluck a few stray eyebrows
Wonder why
Feed hungry mouths
Drink some black tea
Pick crumbs off the couch
Change the batteries
Read Moo Baa La La La again
Wander room to room
Barely balance an account
Shampoo little brown curls
Pass out vitamins
Write a couple lines of code
Kiss husband hello or goodbye
Scribble a grocery list
Wish vaguely
Sweep up dried playdough chunks
Empty the dishwasher
Fold warm scented laundry
Brush sixty-eight teeth
Type a blog post
Lay my head down
Whisper a prayer
Get one day closer

—T.U.C., first appeared at Tweetspeak Poetry

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Seal Lullaby

Oh! Hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,
    And black are the waters that sparkled so green.
The moon, o’er the combers, looks downward to find us
    At rest in the hollows that rustle between.
Where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow;
    Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!
The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark
    overtake thee,
Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas.

—Rudyard Kipling, see more in Kipling: Poems