Poetry Wednesday: "My Daughter Walks in the Garden"
It is soil, an altar; water, a gift;
A seed and a miracle thrust in the rift;
What shimmers, what acts, what passes to birth,
What breeds and what signifies out of the earth.
She speaks, and it changes; dreams, and it grows;
Through her palms run the causes, the ends through her toes,
Of a frame that obliges the girth of my hand,
And a mass that ordains the plot where I stand,
That I never behold but willing and bowed
Because she has been where the bounty is sowed.
She is child and promise, fealty and play,
Daughter and visitation in May;
When she alters, the elements alter in turn;
When she moves, the fundaments are moved with concern;
And the fact of my seeing is duty and prayer,
And the light of reflection the shade of my care –
The callings to life that flourish and bless
That are always already inscribed in her flesh.
So because I have knelt by the germinal bed
As the noon and my gaze anointed her head,
And the breath in the humus anguished to bloom
In the glory and weight of the form she assumed,
Till mud was transfigured to luminous ground,
Through all of my springs, I am made, I am bound.