Weeks in, I’m still

arrested by the thought

Why seeing a baby enter the world

makes me cry every time

And the smell of birth

sticks to me, taunting me

Like the smell of blood, but more

unpleasant, more divine

Pure life force, bursting out angry

A minerality that dislodges

the edge of things

Will it always feel like this?

Like the beginning of everything

in the breadth of a gasp, of a little hello.