Hellobee Boards

I don't have one... but I love that poem. We used it as a reading in our wedding! (Though it was a bit of an awkward reading....)

@sunny: ditto! We had a reading of "I carry your heart" for our wedding too.

@MRS. BEEMER: I don't have a quote yet for LO (she's only a day old) but I always sing the "ho hey" song by the Lumineers to baby in my tummy. I sang it to her since she's born too and I swear she recognizes it and I painted it for an artwork for her room: "I belong with you, You belong with me, you're my sweetheart..."

Sorry this is not a quote, but a whole poem, that DH found and shared with me--Daniel Day-Lewis's father wrote it for him the day he was born. I cried reading it imagining holding our baby boy for the first time in May...I want to print it and put it in his nursery!

The Newborn

This mannikin who just now
Broke prison and stepped free
Into his own identity--
Hand, foot, and brow
A finished work, a breathing miniature--
Was still, one night ago,
A hope, a dread, a mere shape we
Had lived with, only sure
Something would grow
Out of its coiled nine-month nonentity.

Heaved hither on quickening throes,
Tossed up on earth today,
He sprawls limp as a castaway
And nothing knows
Beside the warm sleep of his origin.
Soon lips and hands shall grope
To try the world; this speck of clay
And spirit shall begin
To feed on hope,
To learn how truth blows cold and loves betray.

Now like a blank sheet
His lineaments appear;
But there's invisible writing here
Which the day's heat
Will show; legends older than language, glum
Histories of the tribe,
Directives from his near and dear--
Charms, curses, rules of thumb --
He will transcribe
In his own blood, to write upon an heir.

This morsel of man I've held--
What potency it has,
Though strengthless still and naked as
A nut unshelled!
Every newborn seems a reviving seed
Or metaphor of the divine.
Charged with the huge, weak power of grass
To split rock. How we need
Any least sign
That our stone age can break, our winter pass!

Welcome to earth, my child!
Joybells of blossom swing,
Lambs and lovers have their fling,
The streets run wild
With April airs and rumours of the sun.
We time-worn folk renew
Ourselves at your enchanted spring,
As though mankind's begun
Again in you.
This is your birthday and our thanksgiving.