First Birthday

First Birthday

For Sophia, 29 July 2007.

You kept us enthralled with feats, unsheathing incisors,
Pushing a star, at last, through a star-shaped hole.
In secret, you circled a whole sun, spinning a filament
For your skein of orbits.

Midday that Saturday, texting news from Holles Street,
Rushing your name, a held breath, to the air.

We were up for two nights. You feel translucent, slush grey.
Your vitals gleamed green through my faded ribs.
In the delivery room, arrayed for you in hushed purpose,
Everything near you waited too.

At four the radio playing Sibelius, everything depending on
Numbers, on the persistence of your heart.

To sit there devouring the tiny, smeared glyphs of you.
What sand writes in a seashell's lacquered throat is almost
Not believably there, allowing only the fairy small
To truly see, to decipher it.

In Avoca, a woman warning her child not even to breathe
On you. Gathering you close, ourselves breathless.

For weeks we cut careful vees in Pampers to keep safe
The thick inch of cut cord, dense with our woven blood.
By February you strained at candle flames, already
Liking light too much, stuck in winter.

Leaving you at the crèche that first morning, not crying
Until the Southern Cross, where someone let me go.

The sister took you womb wet to gravity, the scales
Under the fire sign, where your weight, your bearing
Under heaven was set down, measured. Mass in kilograms:
How much the world wanted you.

Then holding you, finally, and thinking: So that's it.
It's unending, universal, a constant. It's never letting go.