Hymn to Motherhood

I am watching you, my daughter:
motherhood is shaping, rounding,
and completing you as a woman.

Your eyes turn downy, soft with tenderness;
your voice croons a lullaby,
your body, your whole being ripens:
turning your lap into a nest;
your breast flooding with the dew of life;
hands ready to hold, feed, and caress.
Terms of endearment you are scattering
and nursery rhymes whispering,
your ear attuned to the child's cry in the night,
that helpless call in the language
only a mother can hear,
the Morse code of intimacy,
carried through the umbilical cord,
which never breaks between a mother and her child.

Motherhood, my child, has transformed you,
spiritualized,
with humanity connected
and to me returned.

I am watching you, my daughter,
with love and pride,
not sure whether it is you or I,
that woman experiencing motherhood for the first time
yet all over again.

That daughter we are raising together
as one woman and a mother,
is that you, my first and only child,
my revelation and my masterpiece,
or through your child a new life is born
renewing us
through the most powerful force - Love
in the service of the most powerful instinct --
preservation of humankind.