What My Child Learns of the Sea

What my child learns of the sea

Of the summer thunder

Of the bewildering riddle that hides at the vortex of spring

She will learn in my twilight

And childlike

Revise every autumn

What my child learns

As her winters fall out of time

Ripened in my own body

To enter her eyes with first light

This is why

More than blood,

Or the milk I have given

One day a strange girl will step

To the back of a mirror

Cutting my ropes

Of sea and thunder and sun.

Of the way she will taste her autumns-

Toast-brittle, or warmer than sleep

And the words she will use for winter

I stand already condemned.