
With a new birth so close, we find that our attention is fixed on Reuben. He has been the everyday miracle for 20 months now & our lives have been rebuilt around the phenomenon. From a squalling nugget lost in the folds of a pillow, he has evolved into the driven little creature who clambered up onto the seat of the big wooden chair &, watching us watching him, launched himself onto a pile of cushions. Not once but over & again & each time laughing manically.
It is this unalloyed delight, this utter absorption in everything that he does that seduces us each time. Itís so easy to provoke in him a sense of wonder, unmitigated by prior knowledge or experience. Everything that he does is powered by the unquestioning conviction that it has never been done before. And as parents we are as irrationally convinced that no baby to toddler to tiny child has ever staggered along this evolutionary route so beguilingly before.
NO HORIZONS
How I covet
your knee-high world,
down there inside
the reek of ragwort
and fennel; where fugitive
cornstalks rattle and scrape
and surgeon grass cuts clean.
You know the names
of nothing and are
fearless, keeping company
with forgotten denizens
in wings and armour.
You drink the cuckoospit
and breathe the ashen dust.
For you there are no horizons;
there is no curvature
to bring you back
to where you started from.
11:08:09 PM
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