Aoife pushes past pine needles
To the wind-chilled flesh of her baby boy.
Calum, or Canaan, or Canine.
To be young, she thinks, is to be malleable.
To be squishable like wet peat into what tomorrow may need.
The boy, the dwelling, the natural,
all verdant beneath the fronds
of every tree the world will ever know.
Even here, paradise is breaking.
Where the wind blows dry needles to smoke-signal flurries,
a single drop of rain from on high warns Aoife
to pray for the invention of a raincoat,
or that her baby will thicken his skin to rubber,
his fingers to flippers,
and mould himself to weather, this new horizon.
How many more raindrops
before baby must take to water?
To see what is to come is a changeable feast.
To look at the buttery squish of your baby
and wonder if his fate in the garden is set.
Will he have always lain, and moved not his fate
around him, like he pulls up clumps of damp Earth
with his pillowed fists?
To pray for a raincoat is one thing.
The other is to know that your son is malleable,
and pray, for his changeableness, to pull him forward,
to pull a new verdance from the flood.
Cate Bone
Cate Bone is a Glasgow based writer originally from Renfrewshire. Her work focuses primarily on issues of Scottish land and identity. She has most recently contributed to the Kelvingrove Writers’ anthology, of the Lunar Persuasion.