I am pregnant with words, like cells, multiplying into phrases, stanzas. Gravid, I am heavier with poetry than I ever was with child I have only born the one my daughter, her name picked as much for meaning as for sound Light. Gift of God. Named at birth like her siblings, my word-children - each with birth-date carefully noted Their placenta a dictionary, thesaurus; their amniotic fluid thought, memory, dreams My breasts poured milk for her, nourished her; now I produce metaphors and similes, conceits all, in the same endless flow I sit here in this night, wet from the bath because this poem, with inexorable contractions, demanded to be born.
