So, tomorrow, I will begin blogging from downstate Michigan, relaxing, eating pizza, watching my children be children.
Tonight's poem from Sharon Olds is about a mother and a child. The small moments that imprint themselves on your heart.
It speaks to Saint Marty tonight.
First Weeks
by: Sharon Olds
Those first weeks, I hardly knew how to
love our daughter. Her face looked crushed,
crumpled with worry--and not even
despairing, but just disheartened, a look of
endurance. The skin of her face was finely
wrinkled, there were wisps of hair on her ears,
she looked a little like a squirrel, suspicious,
tranced. And smallish, 6.13,
wizened--she looked as if she were wincing
away from me without moving. The first
moment I had seen her, my glasses off,
in the delivery room, a blur of blood
and blue skin, and limbs, I had known her,
upside down, and they righted her, and there
came that faint, almost sexual, wail, and her
whole body flushed rose.
When I saw her next, she was bound in cotton,
someone else had cleaned her, wiped
the inside of my body off her
and combed her hair in narrow scary
plough-lines. She was ten days early,
sleepy, the breast engorged, standing out nearly
even with the nipple, her lips would so much as
approach it, it would hiss and spray.
And when we took her home, she shrieked
and whimpered, like a dream of a burn victim,
and when she was quiet, she would lie there and peer, not quite
anxiously. I didn't blame her,
she'd been born to my mother's daughter. I would kneel
and gaze at her, and pity her.
All day I nursed her, all night I walked her,
and napped, and nursed, and walked her. And then,
one day, she looked at me, as if
she knew me. She lay along my forearm, fed, and
gazed at me as if remembering me,
as if she had known me, and liked me, and was getting
her memory back. When she smiled at me,
delicate rictus like a birth-pain coming,
I fell in love, I became human.
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| A small moment |
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