"Greeting the barefoot child"

Babies are very, very special entities.I haven't had one in a long, long time, but I remember vividly the deliveries of my two children as I'm sure all women remember theirs. After all, it's a pretty cool thing to bring life out of your own body. Humbling and thrilling and scary and painfully wonderful all at once. Yes, pretty cool. But now, in my advanced non-childbearing age, I appreciate babies on another level.
When I look at a baby, I see "intimations of immortality." I see a being that doesn't communicate with words, but simply with its presence. I see eyes that really look. I don't know what babies see, but they surely see something and maybe that something is not just its physical surroundings. Somehow, I think a very young baby sees and knows much more than we think. Just because they can't verbalize, doesn't mean they don't know what is happening on some level. Perhaps they know more than we do.
I don't know why I feel this way, but looking at babies makes me think that anything is possible. For them, for me, for the world. My jaded sensibilities are suspended for a few moments and I see pure love looking back at me. Not necessarily from only babies that I know, but any baby passing by in it's father's arms or ensconced in a stroller. It doesn't matter.
Maybe I'm a silly old lady. Maybe I just want every child's life to be filled with love and I'm projecting that onto these wee ones. It doesn't matter, I love looking at babies and hoping they stay as wonderful as they are at that moment for the rest of their lives.

Here is Linda Pasten's poem about birth.


Notes from the Delivery Room

by Linda Pastan

Strapped down,
victim in an old comic book,
I have been here before,
this place where pain winces
off the walls
like too bright light.
Bear down a doctor says,
foreman to sweating laborer,
but this work, this forcing
of one life from another
is something that I signed for
at a moment when I would have signed anything.
Babies should grow in fields;
common as beets or turnips
they should be picked and held
root end up, soil spilling
from between their toes—
and how much easier it would be later,
returning them to earth.
Bear up ... bear down ... the audience
grows restive, and I'm a new magician
who can't produce the rabbit
from my swollen hat.
She's crowning, someone says,
but there is no one royal here,
just me, quite barefoot,
greeting my barefoot child.

"Notes from the Delivery Room" by Linda Pastan, from Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998. © W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)