Grandchild by Charlotte Mandel

Grandchild
by
Charlotte Mandel

for Benjamin, five days old

I am breaking apart with happiness
My body, that river slowly adding
tarry silences

risen--
an upward cascade of radiance

I had not known that I revolved in a cloak
of unborn space--
the light I could not reflect,
itself a darkness,
waiting

There is
no separate
infinite

The drops of me
ravish the light, every sip
an open wing

This poem first appeared in Response: A Magazine of Contemporary Jewish Thought (Spring 1983).
Used here with the author's permission.

Photo credit: Richard Mandel

Charlotte Mandel lives in New Jersey. Though she didn't embrace poetry until midlife, she is the author of eleven collections and her awards include a Lifetime Achievement Award from Brooklyn College, the New Jersey Poets Prize, and two fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Charlotte's published work also includes the Eileen W. Barnes Award anthology of older women poets, Saturday's Women, and a series of essays on the role of cinema in the life and work of Hilda Doolittle. Learn more about Charlotte at charlottemandel.com.

dotief@comcast.net:
Wow!
Posted 09/12/2010 01:00 PM

Ginny C.:
lovely poem
Posted 09/12/2010 10:15 AM

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