Today's poem is by Frances Klein

Born in the Rain
       

I was born in the rain, pearls of perspiration
embroidering the wavetops.

My husband was born in a deluge
that washed out the shortcut
his father took to the hospital,
my mother-in-law torn by back labor,
heart flooded with fear and unshed love.

Our son is a miscible liquid,
both the estuary of our mingled waters
and his own unknowable storm.

The sky opened on his life
the moment we stepped out into it,
droplets limning his lashes
while I waited on the curb
feeling fraudulent and grateful,
unaware of the pain to come.

His eyes are the color
of a slow, silt-soaked river:
muddy Missouri, Mississippi molasses.

On my first birthday as a mother,
I swaddle him on the porch swing as rain
shakes the branches, his Mississippi eyes
darting back and forth with the birds
that are bending the air between trees.

The morning I was born, my mother
gazed out the hospital window
to see rain streaking the streetlights
before returning to the vernix-streaked
window of my face.

Copyright © 2025 Frances Klein All rights reserved
from Another Life
Riot in Your Throat
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission