Shearwater By Rachel Richardson

You were given feet but had never touched
them to earth. You were given the sea
and you fed upon it for months.

So when your head crowned, ashen
with loss of blood from the cord
wound tight around your neck,

and when they cut you from me,
and you were silent, and the tide in me
receded, I remembered the shearwaters

following the ship—the slow sweep
of them riding the wind’s current.
The stretch of them, hovering,

cruciform, shearing the air the way an envelope
slides back into a box of letters, making
its narrow space. I had watched

from the stern for hours their trailing:
as if stillness itself drifted toward me.
I thought it was my life.

Then someone lifted you up,
and there was a sound,
and they laid you on me, breathing.