I meet her at the Peace Garden gathering
where she’s singing and dancing for peace.
It’s September 11, and her belly is round
and moon-ish. She has no wrinkles yet,
no flashes of gray in her hair.
She is so sincere as she recites poems,
as if with right words and right songs
and right moves she could help
create a peaceful world that her baby will enter.
She’s a month away from her due date
and I don’t tell her those cramps she’s feeling
are contractions. I don’t tell her
he’ll cry for a year. I don’t tell her
about how they’ll laugh too loud together
how they’ll both thrive in the small night hours,
how sixteen years later she’ll marvel
at how love rules her life
in the fiercest and most tender ways,
how the boy will have grown to six foot four,
how he will teach her about fast cars and graphic cards
and forgiveness and humility and apps.
Sixteen years later, she will be less herself
and more something larger, more
driven by love than ever, though it
is nothing she could have imagined.
No, I just say, Nice to meet you. You look familiar,
like a woman I used to know well.
And she smiles in a dreamy far off way.
She thinks she knows what will happen.
Yes, I remember that well.
