Poem for the Day: Motherhood

Startling awake in the morning,
I wonder that my life is this one all around me,
the smells in the kitchen, my body marked and mapped
by babies and garden work and sitting too long to write.
I notice more every day, how nothing is shadowed
but whole and solid, how the frozen lilac branches
soften, bud, embarrass us with fragrance.
Faces are precious things I pick up and hold,
feeling their contours against the bones of my chest,
releasing them into deep sky.
Will they be the clouds I see when I am very old,
will they return to me in the glitter of dew,
in the clear waters of Jackson Run,
swollen with snowmelt and rain, warming in late afternoon
when the children run down with their nets,
hoping for whales, treasure, a wriggling minnow,
something that they can touch and call their own.