Cecil Morris
Cecil Morris retired after teaching high school English for 37 years and now tries writing what he once taught his students to understand and (he hopes) to enjoy. He and his partner, the mother of their children, divide their year between Northern California and the Oregon coast. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in Cimarron Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and elsewhere.
My Baby, Ode #6
My baby is amplitude, abundance, surplus.
Her chin has an understudy, her hips backups,
her thighs the strength of ten or a dozen,
her knees resilience to spare so she bend and rise
and bend and rise, her ankles and arches the spring
to launch a thousand thousand lives and buoy child
through crisis, doubt, and loneliness. She plenitude
of grace. She the endless river of forgiveness,
its cool water rushing over cast off boulders
and pooling still at deep, deep holes. Her heart, her mind,
her body the softest landing pad, a meadow
of undulations and high grass and wild flowers
in bloom throughout the year. She the capacious home
that always smells of something good cooking, something
filling, something healthy, something that satisfies
the soul’s inexpressible needs. She the welcome,
the come here, baby, come here now and let me.
She is the very air, everywhere all the time,
a stillness invisible, a quiet patience,
a willingness to wait or, maybe, cooling breeze
or sudden listen-here gust or insistent wind,
relentless, inexhaustible, encouragement.
Oh, yes, that’s my baby, a presence perfected,
a hallowed amplitude, a blessed abundance.
