Today’s poem is a response to Michelle H. Barnes’ “These Are the Hands” challenge on Today’s Little Ditty: “Consider writing about the place that empathy has in your own life—a time you offered compassion to another or a time it was freely given to you.”
Freely given … this is the first thing that comes to mind. Adapted from a post I wrote three years ago.
He wakes—that sound.
That rasp.—Is it?
It is.
He traces it to the crib.
The baby. Just three months old.
Not breathing right.
Hand to her little face—no fever.
She stirs under his touch, still sleeping.
Breath ragged, rattling.
He is young.
It is his first child.
He goes back to bed.
But
he carries his baby with him.
Lies awake all night
with her beside him
making sure
she still breathes.
-She does.
Long after he does not.
*******
Thank you
for all the nights
you watched over me
when asthma attacked,
Daddy.
lit bits and pieces 
A beautiful tribute to your father’s dedication to you. I read it on the padlet, so I’m glad you wrote it here so I could comment.
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Thank you, Margaret. It’s almost a found poem of my own post! He was up at night for years, checking on me, running a vaporizer, giving me meds… so he came to mind immediately. He told me this story of the first asthma attack and I’ve treasured it all my life.
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So absolutely beautiful. The care and the compassion he showed. Yes, it’s technically what a father “should” do.
And yet.
It means the world, all of these small moments of being there and being there and being there.
As for me, my compassion poem was written the day my brother died. I was up at night, long after having sat with my sister-in-law while she told her son what had happened, and long after having sat with my mother, who was trying to put the pieces together. Every so often, I come back to that poem. But boy oh boy is it hard.
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My dad was by nature rather gruff so the tenderness of this story – which he told to me himself, “I put you in the bed beside me so I could make sure you kept breathing” – is something I’ll treasure always. — is that the compassion poem I read, Lainie? The one after you lost your brother?
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I think it might be a different one…? This one I posted on my personal blog, when I was still using that one…https://lainielevin.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/poem/
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I commented there 💔😭
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…and I’m just thinking a little bit further now about your title – Baby’s breath – which implies such delicateness, such sweetness and fragility. That one snuck up on me. BRAVO.
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Thank you ❤️
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