Spy Poetry: Week One by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Editor’s Note: The poet, through many fine and surprising images, describes the miniature miracle of her newborn grandchild.

Week One

She sleeps and eats, and all the while stays curled
as though still inside my daughter’s body,
in that thick calm of muffled sound that held her,
must be soothing her still
here in the room though none of us can feel it.

She is fine like a ringlet of fiddlehead fern
before it unfurls in the summer forest,
spiraled frond, close to the ground,
most of the plant still root and rhizome
hidden beneath the earth.

Her face, placid as a newly polished stone,
that sits with its perfect even weight
in the curve of an open palm.

All afternoon the soft snail of her
sleeps on her father’s chest.