This Birthday

                       The cool light turns
everything gray—my fingers settle

in the grass. Wingless cicadas sleep
beneath leaves curling like ribbons

Now is the time to feel alive. Clouds
rear back until light is the holy word

The grass blades under me come to
patterns of rest. Pendulous branches

and fibrous bark make a crown. If
I cannot be a mother I still want no

life but this one pocket of air rising
through the water like a rosary bead

I pray to a God who keeps me here
Soft light from the foliage shatters

I can give up happiness. I’ll go bury
my dreams first thing in the morning

Copyright © 2024 by E. J. Koh. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 2, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“I was thirty-four when I found myself pregnant. At my ultrasound, they said my gestational sac was empty, a blighted ovum. For my second loss, two months after my first, I had a procedure the week of my doctoral defense. Such unbearable weight also revealed a lightness. I could still choose to see joy as though it were placed into my arms, like a child with its first healthy cries.”
—E. J. Koh