Tiny Swimmer with the Rushing Heart

My mother wrote this poem for my daughter, Claire, a few months before she was born.

On the birth of Elizabeth Claire: poem from a new grandmother - by Carol Hanson

June 24, 2009 at 9:22pm

It seems I just heard about you.
Now you are here,
tiny swimmer with the rushing heart,
thrust from your watery element
into our air and light.
Going where?
Oh, what things will you see?
and what will you do?

Already your tracks have pressed
into my heart & mind,
long before you were born.
For a second skin of softness
(against that which nothing can be softer)
each stitch I knit furiously into the night
with wonder & thoughts of you

Fair beauty of the nether lands,
small goddess blonde and blue?
Little Levantine, darker, exotic?
a miniature of my Taurean father
translated into the feminine?
facsimile of an elusive Native ancestress?
Could anyone predict?

Memories of babies born,
mine, not mine,
swirling in my brain,
hands racing, needles clicking,
garments flowing out of fiber,
pondering the human race,
how it continues,
in spite of everything.

In spite of everything,
or perhaps because of it,
you have been born.
Now I can see you,
hold you, love you.
If you are cold or hungry
Don't be afraid
Just cry
Someone will come to fill your every need,
Faster than your heart can beat,
Or you could ever swim.

Little sweet one,
you cannot know,
how everything has become so different,
nothing is the same nor ever will be,
no one around you is untouched, unshaped,
by the simple fact of your existence.

The very air is different
an atmosphere heavy with joy.
It boggles the mind how
someone so helpless can have such power
to create our most intimate world anew
and set our hearts to dancing.

Identities are redefined on your arrival.
There are new names for us.
Your awaiting gifts shine from shelves
Even our music is transformed -
Oldies, country, rock, what have you -
Into the slow, dreamy melody of lullabies.

All of us will wait now.
Through the hours, days, weeks, months
of your cries
and of your silence,
until that day
when you first can speak
and tell us
what is in
your young and rushing heart.