Rachel sends the sonogram today
of what will become (God willing)
our grandchild.
Looks like a bean
in a soup bowl. Someone
thoughtfully wrote BABY!
with an arrow pointing to it,
to tell us where to look.
God willing isn’t something
I’m known to say, but this child
carries the seeds of generations
beaten and starved,
herded into ghettos,
forced out through pogroms
because they clung
to their God. They knew
the treachery of journey,
how fickle the chance of arrival.
So each day of the next
seven months, I’ll send something
resembling a prayer
that it thrives in that watery mix,
that it emerges, in its time,
whole and ready,
because BABY!,
though we’re both distant
from the ancestors,
is still, in miracle, swaddled.
First published by Yellow Arrow.
