A Beautiful Poem

I saw this poem on a favorite site today.  It is a balm for mothers of babies who have died, and I am not one of them and pray that I never will be.

I think, though, that there is something in it too for the rest of us, both mothers and fathers of perfectly healthy, perfectly happy, wonderfully alive little babes.  There is a delicate grief, a tickle of almost-pain, that accompanies every day of my motherhood, every day that I say good night to my son at the age he is.  Time passes for the two of us at a different rate.

There are many things that are clear to me now that I never before understood.  I feel compassion for the stumbling, fumbling mothers out there who have been conscripted into the job of pushing away the little souls that they long to hold close.  I grieve, not dramatically, but gently, for the newborn boy I brought home from the hospital 10 months ago, who bears no resemblance at all to the dynamo that I now find myself chasing around the house.  In 10 months I will grieve for this version of my son.  Every month stacks another son onto another son who I will never see again.  Such is the way of it.

When he is forty three I will look at his crow’s feet, and see his baby eyes.  Always my baby.  And already a big boy.  He will be one year old in just a month.  It is a joy I almost can’t bear.  He throbs in my heart all day, that is exactly the truth.

Parenthood.  It is a weepy experience.

The End

It is time for me to go, mother; I am going.

When in the paling darkness of the lonely dawn

you stretch out your arms for your baby in the bed,

I shall say, “Baby is not there!”–mother, I am going.

I shall become a delicate draught of air and caress you;

and I shall be ripples in the water when you bathe,

and kiss you and kiss you again.

In the gusty night when the rain patters on the leaves

you will hear my whisper in your bed,

and my laughter will flash with the lightning

through the open window into your room.

If you lie awake, thinking of your baby till late into the night,

I shall sing to you from the stars, “Sleep mother, sleep.”

On the straying moonbeams I shall steal over your bed,

and lie upon your bosom while you sleep.

I shall become a dream,

and through the little opening of your eyelids

I shall slip into the depths of your sleep;

and when you wake up and look round startled,

like a twinkling firefly I shall flit out into the darkness.

When, on the great festival of puja,

the neighbours’ children come and play about the house,

I shall melt into the music of the flute and throb in your heart all day.

Dear auntie will come with puja-presents and will ask,

“Where is our baby, sister?”

Mother, you will tell her softly,

“He is in the pupils of my eyes, he is in my body and in my soul.”

~ Rabindranath Tagore