Tonight the family (except David, who is branding cattle in Circleville and Tanner, who had a previous engagement)went to Winger's tonight to bid farewell to Ben and Susie, who are heading back to Alaska this week-end. On the way there, I mentioned to Susie (Ben's girlfriend) that Parker had 4 teeth pulled today from his cleft area and Ben and I started talking about everything that occurred when he was first born. I recounted to Susie how I had taken Brandi to Fetal Foto for fun, for her birthday, two months before he was born. We were just there to get a fun little video of the baby. As the technician was doing the ultra-sound, she got kind of quiet, then asked Brandi if she were going to have another ultra-sound before the baby arrived. Brandi said no since the first one looked okay. The Tech was sort of quiet for a moment and then suggested she call her Dr. since she saw some "shadows" on the baby's face that didn't look right. Talk about bursting the bubble! We had a long weekend before she could get a hold of the Dr. on Monday morning. When we found out Parker would be born with birth defects, we mourned for a time. Then, we picked ourselves up, followed Brandi's lead and became educated, then anxiously awaited the birth of our first grandchild!
This poem is one I wrote before he was born and is one of my favorites. The epigram is from an Emily Dickinson poem "Hope is a thing with feathers....." comparing hope with a bird, whose song you can hear the strongest in the heart of the storm.
The Creation
And sweetest-in the Gale-is heard-And sore must be the storm-Emily Dickinson
My daughter’s belly
is a taut, smooth globe
that separates light from darkness,
rumbling oceans from dry earth.
It is a nautilus chamber
through which I speak love
in low tones,
deep as sonar that reaches
the whales and dolphins
and fishes of the sea.
My first grandchild swims freely
inside that swollen belly,
unaware that through ultrasound,
the doctors are identifying
the problems he will have
when he casts off the first estate
of his mother’s womb.
I think of the whales
as I put my ear to the shell
of my daughter’s skin.
How a school of whales have been
known to carry one of their own
for weeks until wounds heal
and the hurt can swim on its own.
Dickinson never had a child,
a grandchild, but she knew
the strength in fragile things.
A seed. The bird’s song.
Hope, that feathered edge that separates
light from dark.
Marilyn Darley Williams
