Birth

and strolling around their garden I imagine our child: grass tickling my toes like gelled hair, spiked when a teenager; two slides out for summer, side by side, form his legs, sturdy; her arms rise and fall in celebration, despair, alongside the motion of the toddler’s swing. The bunting, hung from tree to lamp and back again, create dancing shadows of teeth: some small, milky; others larger, wisdom. Back on the patio I hear clinking ice and cutlery clashing into the voices of a midsummer’s evening - the chatter of our child, too, who’ll learn to speak… Latin? … who will know the names of flowers and stems and petals that nestle inside these hedges and roots within soil that will become their wrinkles, their varicose veins of age and experience. The paving slabs at my feet are his scabs. The crack in concrete show me itchy flesh, dry under plasters from when she fell. Their garden trampoline grows into our child’s skin: undulating, stretching with each bouncing year, then tightening when under pressure only to loosen, be at ease… perhaps when in love? The branches of their garden trees curl lashes around eyes that are leaves blinking in answer to each gentle sigh of this summer night’s breeze and strolling around our friend’s garden - tealights and smiles, spoon, a christening - I try to see our child in their summery bloom ignoring the winter inside me; the barren field, where I wish our baby did blossom