357. and sometimes called grace

a smile in a baby
the smallest smile
and the world smells
green with spring
and birds chirping

there was a reason
to awake this morning
if only to remember
there was a smile
in her and growing

forever ago she was
a littlest thing like
a finger on a baby
just the baby that
she was and were

memory always precedes
the fact of the event
and we love the cheeks
of an infant before
the love that made her

given over to hope
is the presence we have
at the moment of birth
as she is captured by
the cold and foreign air

apgar eight and good
good enough to go
and be a ball of light
attached to a body
and nothing but grasp

baby is a fist of flesh
and fury at the cold
the light and wanting
and full of wanting just as we
had become empty of breath

the first cry is the cat’s
then wailing where
an ear might catch it
and respond through
the presence of the body

we give her warmth as
she gives us her small weight
I’d say she’d eyed us but
at first the eyes wander
unfocused and do not catch us

her times are not all quiet
coming at us furry with lanugo
and shed in the breadth
of an instant but still her
delicate fontanel lingers on

we are given to contemplation
by the sleeping of infants
in our arms that are a cradle
and think that we were made
for something even maybe this

and given over by worry
that the life entrusted to us
by nothing more than fate and love
is now a life we are charged with that
we must keep we must keep

there is grave horror in the love
of a parent for a child not even
known yet but present as a baby
and moving also with
the inaccurate gestures of an infant

yet this is the only love we have
one to give away to someone who
cannot understand it who will not
love us back but only want and
when feeling wanting want even more

we come forth into the light at birth
and we bring our children forward
into that same light the light guiding
the simple revelation that our children
are beings sometimes called grace