It's May. This is the month wild with choices.
You can rush into the strolling sunshine
to join forsythia bursting like popcorn,
and weeping cherry, and the woodthrush whose song
pulsed in southlight this morning.
Come with your hands open or shut.
Come with them slippery from blood.
Don't be afraid. Only slide down a cascade of water.
Come with your eyes azure as a piece of sky.
Or come with eyes a dark complication of gray.
Come trailing the leftover placenta.
Come with vernix like wax over pale new cheese.
Come with no clothes but the color rose
which quickens your flesh.
Come skinny or fat.
Come with hair black as a grand piano.
The count is up now, the game is over.
Come home to this small room.
You'll be as free
and as bound as the star that's framed
tonight in the window above your empty crib.
--Jeanne Murray Walker (1944- ), American poet and playwright, from Poetry magazine, May 1987, p. 92
On this day, 24 years ago, my firstborn was officially past her due date. She would have to be induced 8 days later.
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