Pain and Life, From the Same Birth
Lines to a Newborn Baby
Your cries flash anguish and gutter:
Nothing exists and you drop through darkness.
What could you recognize here? Though your mother’s milk already
Toughens you and prepares you to share
The amazement of the baby mandrill
Crying out as the eyeteeth push through,
The helplessness of the poppy,
The lust of the worm that begins and ends in the earth.
There has been some trouble here, you will find.
A gallery of grisly ancestors
Waits in the schoolroom. Perhaps
You came expecting an Eden
Of perpetual fruit and kindness -
Easily credible after your nothingness.
You will find a world tossed into shape
Like a hatful of twisted lots; locked in shape
As if grown in iron: a stalagmite
Of history under the blood-drip.
Here the hand of the moment, casual
As some cloud touching a pond with reflection,
Grips the head of man as Judith
Gripped that one finished with free will
And the winner’s leisure, that one
Finished with the begging to differ.
Things being as they are, though only by a hair’s breadth,
The brain-stuff is some safety.
Limpets, clamped, suck their salty tongues
Under the sea’s explosions;
And the snail that spreads its edge so wonderingly
Presents, to a touch, an instant
Coiled caul shell of comprehension.
Soon, you will smile.
[Hughes, 96-97]