Out you slid, cabled and wet…

I looked and saw, collared in my own dark fur, your face, blurry with vernix and strange, like a drawing by the Master pen and ink over wet chalk and pricked for transfer. Out you slid, cabled and wet, delivered, time of birth given; yet what I keep is that first look at your pause half-born, sheathed from the neck down, crowned in unfamiliar regions of light and air, your lungs beginning to draw as you verged on our world and waited, prescient, rare.

Fiona Benson – Childbed