Courtney Kampa: Poems about Grace

 Ust Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan

I.

The video was soft and grainy

as an ultrasound: 11 seconds of a caretaker

holding a baby girl up by the armpits

like a potted plant. When the woman bounced

her in the air, the infant shivered

the way petals do when wind grasps a stem

too thin, too breakable to hold.

We stood a foot from the screen

for hours. Rewind, and play. Rewind, and play.

Inside us, something raised and gathered

like a scar. We were an ache—a gash sealed

for someone other than ourselves.

My husband boiled pots and pots of tea.

We wouldn’t sleep—that baby out there, burning.

Remote and lonely as a star.

II.

At the orphanage she learned early

not to cry—no one came.

Twelve children per nurse, she lay

with sleeves safety-pinned

to the mattress. By mid-afternoon

her window darkened like a clot:

blackness welled up and pooling—

pushing even the clouds

from their sky. Maybe in the stillness

she heard a starling. Maybe she wanted

to sing too—got as far as opening her mouth—but

didn’t know any songs.

III.

To adopt, you visit first.

This is labor:

It is unpinning your baby’s arms

from her crib of toothpicks

and lead paint. It is her squirm when caressed:

caught between an instant of panic

and her lifelong yearn.

It is the cautious curl against a mother’s chest;

how her brown lips part like an upturned beak

as you darn the holes in her clothes. The punctures

made when fettered to her sheets. It is your impulse

to encircle her like a womb. To feel her

breathe and kick in her sleep. To hear her heart

faintly against yours—that pregnant syncopation

you thought you’d never know.

IV.

Touch had turned her hungry—all night

she wailed, her mouth the O

of an open drain.

The next day a nurse yelled

you’ve ruined her—held her too much.

The vein running up her neck

stood out like a blue cable.

She had taught this child what was good

to know: that life would be low pitched

and solo. That dream is just another word

for tunnel. That to be born means the same

as to barrel—the way a train does

from its station. The way this child had, from the body

of the mother

who, first, cut her brakes.

V.

Her toes, like tiny golden hooks, pulled

me up from the world. Mornings she

put the undersides of her feet together,

as though in prayer. I learned a new way to talk

to God—her little feet

in my mouth, in each sentence

I spoke. Once, seeing her socks on the staircase,

the shape of two white eggs,

I burst, grateful, into tears.

VI.

—Did I come from your tummy?

—No, but Grace, you came from my heart.

She hears this, and stretches wide

like the confident roots of a flower.

An outward, earthen stir.

See how her veined palm draws, gently,

toward the roots in mine? Our dangling threads

crocheted into a trellis, like lace—a helix

we’ve doubled and twisted

by hand.