The Baby (Celia) | Willow Jopp

How does such a simple, innocent face

Paint one thousand colours with a smile?

She had as well a smile to be seen:

Soft as a willow tree, smooth as china,

Exult with her youth, do you remember?

See that? The golden glory of her eyes?

Ageless; Ductile like poetry's first words,

Pure; like the poem that is no poem,

A birth, a miracle, illness, a hearse.

Life stolen from someone who did not know

How to keep it, or why it ended thus.

Your eyelids from birth lay idle by night;

Out of the oven, into the trash can.

Before our greedy eyes of ivory

Celia has lost this life's lottery

And she isn't coming back.