Quill & Parchment: My Gray Child

My Gray Child
by John McCluskey

crescent moon in mourning gray
   three inches long
   three months
   waning
broke      away
one easter sunday morning
in some year
before our first child
was born

   in some year
   before 1991
we awoke
my wife felt
rejection expulsion
in untimely
unwelcome
muscle waves    and
thy will was done

an extra chromosome the science behind it
from a sterile
looking chair
in some doctor's office
i heard
our gray child's
heartbeat
in early spring
expecting the birth
in the future fall

i had to sit down
steel myself
   for ultrasound's announcement

having no idea
how to internalize
the rapid-fast fury of
spanking new thumps
coaxed from behind
a thick muscled wall of tomb

   where this shy heart
   should have
    honed its rhythm
on its own
   before they rolled    away the stone

easter arrived early that year before 1991

i prefer snow
on easters in march
nice to think
of colored eggs
in last nest
of winter's white womb
what better reason
to miss a family holiday
   then again

snow might have made
our hospital trip
dangerous passage
   in that year
   during my thirties
and we did
need to leave
our specimen
(our child)

to identify
which wind
shook fresh fruit
from our tree
   as if a miscarriage
   would excuse me
had i decided it was too soon
anyway to fall in love
with    this child

oh love

how i love
when easter arrives early in spring
when i am overwhelmed by the passage of time
when i produce a good heartfelt prayer
when i am alone
when my wife and i are at home
when i drive across the fat part of my flat illinois birthplace
when i realize that a good heartfelt prayer is not something one produces

when my eye catches some rogue star in heaven's wet ink
speeding away from its pack
along the curved back of time

when everything i love diminishes me to joy

and i understand, my gray child, that everything that happens to me
   does not happen to me alone.

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