Mother and Child by Greg Watson

Just across the street, where yet another
sleek, modern apartment complex has arisen,
seemingly overnight, I can spy the figure
of a woman in one window, many stories up,
gently swaying, her baby blanketed and held closely,
moving perhaps to a music which only they
can hear, or to the silence they share between
them, framed within this moment, far above
the winter groans of traffic below, a maddening
wind rushing the clouds along, rattling the
tiny metal doors of streetlamps and flagpoles,
bending the trees one way, then another.
I look away, only for a moment, and of course
they are gone, the window glass shimmering with
winter blues, an amber-tinted lightbulb
reflected like a distant star, slowly receding
from view on such a cold and bitter morning,
just now beginning to stir, just now
beginning to wake into the story of itself.



Greg Watson's work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently The Sound of Light. He is also co-editor with Richard Broderick of The Road by Heart: Poems of Fatherhood.