The Baby

The baby will sleep in a room filled with calm adverbs and adjectives, like ‘softly’ ‘soundlessly’ and ‘angelic (from the OE engel)’. I am breath-taken, joyous, an idiom. at peace. We roam around in the grass at the back of her place, collecting objects like magnets and buttons. She sews them to dolls and bears. We have buttons everywhere for our baby, in my coffee pot, in her vases, in our bed, in my pockets, in her ears. We have a new happiness sprung from the baby words, chuckle, whimper, cuddle, lullaby, that surround us. I get colourful pencils and I find the littlest of all the words to underline. Trying to find the littlest words means I have to learn her language. We sit at the table surrounded by books, learning the littlest and softest words of all languages. We are covered in books and buttons.