Newborns

by Guy Walker (April 2020)

The Virgin and Child before a Firescreen, Robert Campin, Circa 1440

Beneath adoring eyes we batten on

her tit, all appetite, with muzzy glaze,

our bowels and bladders loose—daughter or son,

enwrapped and washed in order to erase

the brine that, lately, painted us. It daubed

our mother and our father at our first

conceiving; they, like us, utmost absorbed

in desperate clutch of skin and warmth, their thirst

for love quite animal. But later those

attaching hungers will be dressed in frail

apparel, lent by Reason, to enclose

babes’ flesh. Dressed equally in words which they’ll

speak; raiment with which we’re accoutred thus,

late adjunct, after the event of us.

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Guy Walker a retired French teacher living in the South of England. In addition to writing poetry, Guy has published articles on political and health issues in The Conservative Woman He is technically a Catholic with a predilection for a conservative outlook. He blogs at roseatetern.blogspot.com.

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