TWO POEMS
Dorothy Baird
Threshold
Long ago I held
a baby in my arms
fed him at my breast, wrestled
with the rustless iron
of tantrums, watched him play.
There was no guide,
no map.
Just nights when in his crying
I found myself and lost it
and found it again. And days
when a second split the humdrum
from disaster and still I smiled
and watched and learned
to love and love and despite everything
to love.
And now, as wind
tears at the trees
and shakes this small shed,
as rain splatters on the window
and twenty feet from one threshold
to another is a vast and sodden plain,
he is packing his life
to leave. Soon the house
will be silent and the hours simple
and heavy.
And the stories, my stories,
fling themselves against my flesh
bursting like peonies, like poppies
in their red skirts, like the woman that I am
who's full with living,
who's far from one threshold,
close to another.
Tadpoles
In the pond black
commas wriggle,
punctuating the sun's story
with their own tale of change.
Are they surprised how their energetic tails
day by day shrink
into their dark centre, how legs bud
and branch from it? This morning
I looked at photos
of my children,
those three
that slithered from my own
dark water. How much the days
take from us and give us.
At forty seven I
am toad
and tadpole, croaking gently
as the sun closes its page
of light across the pond.
