21st Century Parents

I can’t quite pinpoint the day
When a limp baby became you;
A little warm, rippling wriggle of muscle
Wrapped with babyfat,
And wrapped too, in almost frightening love.

I can’t quite grasp the moment when
Out of the dumb helpless stare of babyhood
Leapt the cheeky, sparkle-eyed, repository
of all our hopes and fears.
But it was this year you happened to us,
And that in breathless wonder,
Through gigabytes of imagery,
We worked together to conjure up
this warm and dedicated beginning.

Now your audience looks on,
Over coffee, and over tea
With birthday cake, across the seas
Amidst the trillion 0s and 1s in emails
and in video, filmed in my shaky hand.

And you have had your starting orders
And you have taken them well
And you have stood up, and taken
Your first faltering steps, away from us.

So writing this, I cry, for the joy,
Of this deep but wonderful pain,
Knowing that without you, I never could really say
I’d managed anything of note, between my first faltering steps
And these fond foolish fathering lines, written somewhere
Above Athens, with London Gin, stirring
Nostalgia from the freshness of your beginning.

And I can never know, what your mother knows
About how a girl is killed when a mother’s born,
And how this devastating love is more
Precious than any comfort,
And how your mewling and your puking,
And your unutterable beauty
Sit side by side with horror,
and the deepest possible fear,
Born of your birth and the unsayableness
of your imagined disappearance.

 Yes. We are parents of the 21st century,
Faced with our fantasies
in almost every living moment;
You as the future saviour of our kind,
Or you as other headlines,
Or you as Larkin in his spectacles would hope;
Plain, and passing in comfort, without note.

But I cannot believe any of this
All I see is innocence new,
But like any perfection, you
Are more beautiful if I can accept
the changes that will come
And the impossible task you have been set:
To grow unencumbered by us, yet
Always our little girl
And always your own.