Ode to a Granddaughter

                    After Joy Harjo

Bless her, arriving as her great grandma left—
once small as a seed, a silver minnow,
a plum, a loaf, and then—
she took three days to swim free
of her mother’s ocean,
bless her every body of water—

Bless the skin-to-skin-ness of those first
forty days, bless the pater-father-heartbeat right
through the flannel feel of love thumping—
She folded us into herself
where she burst into cosmos—
Bless her entry, and someday exit,
may it be longer than a year of eclipses
and then some—

She can lace her fingers now,
grin wide as a frog in spring, hum,
self-soothe with sucking thumb, reach for love, laugh
when dancing like Pinocchio in her jumper strings—

She swims us upstream; she carries us back
to source. In her arching eyebrow is her Poppa, in her
tiny wrists, her Gram. I see myself in her.
And my first-born girl. Her skin is all the colours
of the Caribbean sand and winter snow.

Bless her brazen drum dances
her tears and tears and terrible griefs to come—
may they draw her closer to the sun.