POEM

NEWBORNS

Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu 

Thomas Aquinas

Beneath adoring eyes we batten on

her tit, all appetite, with muzzy glaze,

our bowels and bladders loose—daughter or son,

enwrapped and washed in order to erase

the brine that, lately, painted us. It daubed

our mother and our father at our first

conceiving; they, like us, utmost absorbed

in desperate clutch of skin and warmth, their thirst

for love quite animal. But later those

attaching hungers will be dressed in frail

apparel, lent by Reason, to enclose

babes' flesh. Dressed equally in words which they’ll

speak; raiment with which we’re accoutred thus,

late adjunct, after the event of us.

This poem first appeared in The New English Review in April 2020