Prenatal Visits

Covering the walls inside the first home,
dozens of passages of Scripture, calligraphed
by hand or painstakingly hand-stitched, 
her whole trailer a trousseau of embroidered belief:
The Lord is my shepherd, and I shall not want.


In the second home, the brazen colors of Kahlo
beside pastel-petaled portals of O’Keefe
and scrawled above the women’s kitchen sink,
Diderot: Man will never
be free until the last
king is strangled
with the entrails of the last priest.


In the third home, my own, originals
in watercolor, oil, wood, stone.
Choirs of Borges: Paradise will be a kind of library.
And whispers of Szymborska:
The world is never ready for the birth of a child . . . .
Let him be happy from time to time
and leap . . . .