Emily Brisse

 

Little child, this morning you woke me when the sky was still black, milky with low clouds and fog, and in the darkness I laid my hands over the places where you like to move.  I thought: soon, the sun. I thought: a new day. I thought: you are already so alive that it frightens and thrills me, you who I know but do not know, you who I feel but cannot see.  I have watched the seasons change all my life. I have anticipated the tightening, the clean coat of snow, the turning over. I have waited for signs, and they have come, every time, in the form of something I have words for.  But you, child, are hidden: I close my eyes and sense you behind a tree trunk, between a row of pumpkins, below the surface of a summer lake.  Your face is the peaks and valleys and plains of the earth, given new sounds, new names, that I've not yet learned how to say.