Jan
21
Meet Ella
Filed Under Announcements |
Born 5:14 pm, January 20, 2008, Room 24 on the twelfth floor of the Roosevelt Hospital in NYC, of which staff was so lackadaisical, under-managed and incompetent that not only my wife, but several others did not receive the requested epidural administration for pain relief. Thank God my wife is a soldier; I’m so proud of her. I thought maybe the thing to do for this post is to quote some lines of classy poetry, so maybe I was going to go with Larkin (”they fuck you up, your mum and dad”), but instead, these closing lines from “Midnight” from Spencer Reece in the hopes of a good life ahead for my daughter, Ella (happy birthday, darling) -
The rest of this panorama is immense, dark, impenetrable, unstructured.
But if you look closely in the left-hand corner,
I can just be distinguished from the blue blue brilliance of all this land,
a tiny figure, no bigger than a grass blade, a shadow hugged by shadows,
heading home after a long walk nowhere,
encircled by a halo of rocks, trees, crops, rivers, clouds -
by every blessed thing conspiring together to save my life.
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