Lark Ascending

A poem from early pregnancy

Lark Ascending

The last note 
arrives
with the 
June evening
and I’m weeping.

I follow my tears
out into the garden
where I look 
into the faces
of each new flower

tenderness
returns like rain
softens everything,
creates music with the leaves.

How have I not 
wept before,
for this?

The green peeking 
from everywhere

the blooms 
unafraid of their own 
eagerness
or bravery
or innocence.

Each flower believes
the world will take care of them.

A gift, unbelievable
to be trusted to 
live in this world

to be among them,
those who drink sunlight
and sing their every thought

children safe
and playing 
naked in the garden.

I am a woman,
six weeks pregnant,
weeping 
on my knees
in the garden

I am earth 
among earth

green among green

a flower, holding flowers.

I cried a lot for the sheer beauty of things in early pregnancy. Carrying the seed of a child seemed to swing open the garden gate of my heart, so the sheer tenderness of everything could rush in, touching me.

I cried when I listened to music. I cried looking at fragility of the flowers. I cried when I heard the birds sing.

Every day was a sea swell of feeling, of raw, unbelievable awe and naked belief.

On this particular day, six weeks into my pregnancy, I had sat on my back porch to listen to the entirety of The Lark Ascending by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, a “tone poem” based on a work of the same name by George Meredith. I had never heard it before. So I settled in to listen and went on an entire soaring journey of feeling.

At the subtle end of it, tears were streaming down my face.

I was crying for the sheer, symphonic wonder of it all. The beauty of life, the fact that a tiny bud was literally unfurling within the earth of me.

I put the head phones down and went out into the garden. I sat on my knees, a supplicant among the trees, and weeped.

There was a lot that was powerfully hard about pregnancy. Sick days and depressions, chronic pain and worry.

But when I look back, this is what I want to remember, to press like a flower into the pages of my memory.

The swell of gratitude. The beauty.

The unbelievable gift of being trusted to live among the wonder.

To bring life, new life, into the ever-ascending poem of this world.