Begets A Reflection of Light

Checking your breathing, your coloring, they said mild jaundice is okay

I did not change then; I arrived and was

invited with a prismatic dawn to stay

I’d heard rosy sonnets spoken to life, but your dad interwove earth and

heavens when he took my hand

Marveled at what we hadn’t met before: delivery room promise land

Steel gates opened to pyrotechnic colors

Rousing me and

naming me among purples, silver streaks, and mothers

The crisp whites of ceiling tiles and the cherry blood

Found enclosure in a bright dewy hopefulness,

the rainbow haven after the flood

And I was neither conductor, nor creator

Rather I was the receptor for your gift of

vision, now bound to the world as an art curator

You sewed my rawness a healthy pink, curled fingers

against my skin

Given new sight the moment I breathed you in