Three Poems For A Newborn

Newborn (1) In the scanning room The gell leaked over your mother's drum-skin belly Domed like St Paul's Basilica You were in the frame, screen goddess You turned your head And seemed to look right at me The nurse's voice was clipped The head is now engaged As she tidied up her implements I nodded to your mother, smiling Lacking the words in her language To bring her clarity My Scots like a ploughshare Heavy and shorn of frills A voice full of glut and peat Dreich with glaur and snowscapes In the ark of her womb You listened to the Yin and Yang of her vowels The guttural growl of mine You float like rice in a paddy field Between two worlds A black and white silent movie A person with the ribcage of a bird Newborn (2) Out of your birth wrappers. Little Yultide gift, you're in danger of being Loved to death, your mouse-soft hands Full of creases like rumpled linen Your unused feet are pupae Hatching wings in glorious technicolour Your parents stand like quicksand Sucking you in, their newest Perfect creation, come alive You open your tiny jaws, Root in the breast for the nipple Before you are washed As if you were eggshell porcelain I look for my son's bones in the turn of your back Your mother's grace in the arch of your tiny wrist New Born (3) Outside the snow hangs on the trees pointing spears at the earth Low on the hill, under the toppled tree A dead fox lies, the pink seal of its mouth fixed in a grim smile two rooks like undertakers' hatrs sit tall and enigmatic staring at the road into this winter, this locked down season of frost the old year rests cold on its bier a pulse of life, like a wren's song through silence has added another name to the family tree her selfhood is yet to unwrap, with the wax and the wane of many milk white moons She is one of the certainties of spring When all the world is ankle deep in snow