Birth Note to My Daughter

by Daniel Donaghy

When I think of your birth––
the twenty-five hours of labor,
the C-section, your heart rate
a monitor’s speeding green blip,
then metal clink and quick orders,
suction, the doctor’s lifting you,
pulling aside your cord as if a curtain
to tell us you were a girl––
I think first of the instant before it,
scalpel arcing your mother’s belly,
her skin and muscle giving way
and your coned head fixed
in the cervix as if at the bottom
of a well, eyes squeezed against
the pure light of the world
you fought to enter, a moment
quicker than a syllable, a snapshot
of you not quite here yet, but
there completely with your mother,
hair dark as your nine months,
a white paste on your arms and back,
neck gone into your shoulders,
then you gone into your mother again,
her skin folding over you like a wave.