Poem for Hallie

Years before,

I knew:

Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. *

But when you were born it came true

Along with at least a hundred other wonders.

 
You opened the sky

And all the new to see

With your newness.

 
I remember moments of you

in glimpses and flashes.

I am often unprepared

For these,

Like sun on glass

Making me squint through the mystery of it.

 
You were the glorious weight,

no more than a blue violet or a bird wing,

beating in my chest;

the baby with bare toes curled in the grass

with a dandelion hidden in her mouth;

the child who talked to trees

and built houses for fairies

and never stopped singing circles around me;

the girl of happy solitude

turning out paintings from the garden of her mind

and poems

shooting up like unexpected daffodils

I didn’t know were planted there.

 
You were and are the one

loving everything

as it was meant to be loved:

with shining eyes,

Finding

A four-leaf clover in the midst of a meadow

 And an entire kingdom in the drop of dew upon it.  
*e.e. cummings, “somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond”