My firstborn daughter, you will never be born.
I mourn. I watched myself take your hand
and teach you, saw you grow, stick straight
with hair like your mother's, only colored like mine.

She's beautiful, your mother—
pale with dark eyebrows, high
cheeks and narrow lips. Her hair
straight and thin, bronze, her eyes
like tea steeped in the sun.

I will tell your sister, or your brother, when
each is old enough to listen
without laughing at an old man,
without hating me for loving
her, your mother, Amira Siobhan—

I will tell your sister of you,
how she might have had a pale
and dark-haired mentor; tell your brother
of his unborn nemesis—I'll tell them

Each how glad I am, my
lovely, never-living girl, my dream,
my daughter, that you were never
born, that you could never make
me proud and happy—

Else how would they, with a mother
not yours, have come to sit
and listen to this old,
sad, wistful man?

poems: alphabetical || chronological
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ChaoSpirals