To Mullara
An elegy to a very sick baby in the NICU who survived
You sleep uncradled, sedate, oblivious of this earthly sphere,
While breath on breath goes whishing through your soul.
All your limbs, plump but still, extend from the corpus
Wrapped in swaddling clothes so white as only drape the sick and dead.
O waning promise of life, how your innocence beams!
How gladly would your home have borne the sleepless nights
Which now portend every possible ill,
If only you had cried those bitter tears which tempt
Travailing mothers back to song! Denying her the sanguine dismay
At leaving the cradle of her aching womb,
Your breathless calm has won your bearer no gratitude.
Your purity chastises her with irreproachable grief;
Oppressive is the silence around you! And colder still
Your feeble half-smile; too modest, as it were, to seek the world.
What mute angelic, heavenly chants tremble on your lips and die!
Your slightest flicker kindles hope; your mother weeps for joy;
Many circles she has run of hoping and despairing,
Her most trifling sins she has repaired, even the pride
In knowing that her son has charming eyes.
But her pretty cherub now seems too much
An image of God ever to dwell in her arms.
Midst reassurances she hears the monotones
Of her endless woes confirmed. The doctors, she suspects,
Are only making trials of new medicines and machines;
She dreads their vacuous trust in fate. Too long has she borne
The anguish of these needles floating in your veins.
Harder still your hopeless father finds to surrender
His fortune, the unripe fruit of his toiling hands, to uncertainty.
Men have sterner hearts, they say, but whoever saw
How he was struck by the callous unconcern
In the rude old nurse’s cynical grin? He complains
Yet squanders all. His face is now a mask that hides
All glorious, childlike dreams he dreamed for you.
See what earnest pain implores you
To answer the limits of human lore;
See how hope has bruised its face
Against the casing round your bed.
Honor the mother who bore you; heed her weary prayer.
Some god has spoken through her gaze
For some god in you to hear.
