A Poem to My Niece

The below poem was written in response to an invitation from my brother's blog http://jamesbrett.wordpress.com/ , where he wanted me to write a poem for National Poetry Month. He took a risk and gave me free reign to write about anything that I wanted to. I decided that no better topic was suitable than Baylor Adelaide Harrison. This was the daughter born to my brother back in December. My niece who I have yet to see. If you don't know already, my brother and his wife are living as missionaries in Tanzania. And I have yet to visit them. So I dedicate this poem to Baylor. But as I began to write it I noticed I began to focus more on my own spiritual longing for rebirth. A sense where the innocence, the wonder, the connectedness to everything was still alive and vibrant and seemed to illuminate all the senses. It isn't a stretch to make the connection, that maybe I was writing about two babies. One being Baylor, the other as i find resonating in the lines, the Christ Child, the Savior of the World. But we poets barely notice what we are writing til later. We just feel powerful surges and try to chisel out images. Needless to say, there is definitely more than one way to read this poem.


-To Baylor


In truth, I cannot at all recall,

What that elusive time was like for me.

Who does? Everyone is striving to stall,

The end scene, that we forget to be,

And a haze falls over our fabled birth,

Robbing us of every moment's mirth.





But you were born across the shifting sea,

The sun that spills out your rosy morning,

Tears himself from our darkened company,

And those distant waves that once were forming,

Now break in storm, to our shadowed shore.

Telling us of you, the gladness that the wind bore.





But in pictures, I have only known you,

And what gushing mothers have seen, and skype.

And these tell of wakening eyes of blissful blue,

Of morning sands, the sea's joy, the earth's hype,

Music we all did hear, when the spheres had sung,

God was near, when the world was young.





What world of soft bliss have your eyes known?

When every breath breathes with Heaven mingle,

And the morning stars sang their silver tone,

And to have a heartbeat is to tingle,

With luxuriant Creation, the Sublime,

That heart-wrenching vision of the Divine.