The Paddock Review

When Touch Breathes

…..

My baby stirs

In my womb

As night swaddles dusk

I place my hand

On my belly

And allow my fingers

Swollen by time

To brush my skin

In circles

My flesh feels like velvet

Dusted with sand

My baby feels like a girl

I imagine putting my finger

On the hollow ridge

Between her nose and lips

A half curled petal

Her breath

Tender as dandelion cotton

Against my skin

You my baby girl will teach me

How to cherish the seasons

As I learn to treasure you

And so

I inhale spring scented jasmine

As rain freckles the sky

I lift my face towards its embrace

Summer lulls me

Into its sultry lavender glory

Wild red berries pearl

Along shrub limbs

The haze of blue skies

Mists my gaze

I marinate in autumn

Musk swells the air

Cold metal gales

Yank life off branches

Bronze leaf embers

Quilt rural pathways

I soak in winter

Smell the spice of wood fires

Watch charcoal storms

Create new tracks

Across crossroads

And I

Ripe with you

Nesting in my belly

Will stroke the soft-spoken earth

Anew

…..

This poem is from the book Birthing Butterflies by Claudia May (Finishing Line Press) and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/birthing-butterflies-by-claudia-may/

Birthing Butterflies offers a humane appreciation of the vital spirit and robust legacy of Black enslaved women. Imbued with beauty and the paradoxical fullness of human complexity, their trauma stories are as restorative as they are harrowing, healing, and liberating. Set amidst a violent socio-economic and predatory slave system, this collection of poems begins with Black love. Black enslaved people upheld each other’s priceless and treasured dignity. They affirmed what James Baldwin would later come to assert, that “a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else’s profit.”[1] Black (un)enslaved mothers embodied the vulnerability, fight, and emotional transparency of the blues. They invoked the agency of the spirituals that dwells in the depths of African diasporic cosmologies. Their speech and wisdoms relished the linguistic ingenuity of Black English and reveled in the dialectal flair of creole. Their nursery rhymes and lullabies were relatives to the dissonant timbres of Jazz and the exultations of lament. As memory keepers, their testimonies sang griot chronicles. In Birthing Butterflies, Black enslaved women become a sacred harbor as they abide in processes of luscious becoming for themselves and generations to come.