Today's poem

Canadian poet's poem on childhood memory

This is a Picture of My Father Right After I Was Born

by Catherine Owen

This is a picture of my father
right after I was born.

His hair was dark then; his beard
a forest with he lake of his mouth in it,

grinning. Smiling so intensely, in fact,
that he had to hold his head in his hands

so it wouldn’t fall apart from happiness
and his ignorance over what having me would mean.

I was just past blood then, swaddled,
and he in scrubs, and we met each other

first in that realm, I crying out and he
so young in all his confused love for me

and somewhere outside the frame my mother
was getting stitched up and the slow

song of her milk
was coming in.

(from the website of League of Canadian Poets)