Morning song: poems for new parents

I. Beginnings

II. Conception and grace

III. Waiting

IV. Birth day

V. Newest child

VI. Sleep and song

VII. At play

VIII. Green and carefree

IX. Lessons

X. Wisdom and courage

XI. Of night and light and half-light

XII. Imagination and memory

XIII. To arrive where we started.

Macmillan introduction

Editor's introduction

What is the beginning? / Christina Rossetti

Children / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sonnet 17 / William Shakespeare

Swans mating / Michael Longley

The son / Pablo Neruda

El hijo / Pablo Neruda

Putting in the seed / Robert Frost

Cello suite / Robert Bragg

Ordinary miracle / Barbara Kingsolver

Seed leaves / Richard Wilbur

Upon seeing an ultrasound photo of an unborn child / Thomas Lux

The beautiful / W. H. Davies

Labor night / Susan Dane

First birth / Sharon Olds

Wheel / Susie Patlove

Morning song / Sylvia Plath

Waking with Russell / Don Paterson

Only she who has breast-fed / Vera Pavlova

Bathing the new born / Sharon Olds

Siena, age 3 months / Michael Chrisman

For Benjamin, beloved son / Thomas Yeomans

The video / Fleur Adcock

Someone would like to have you for her child / Akan Lullaby

Liam / Mary Jo Salter

Dusk (poem fragment) / Sappho

Come, my little children, here are songs for you / Robert Louis Stevenson

Emily wants to play / Mary Jo Salter

Kiss her dreaming / Chivas Sandage

Sweet and low / Alfred, Lord Tennyson

If I can stop one heart from breaking / Emily Dickinson

The best thing in the world / Elizabeth Barrett Browning

12 May 1996 / Ellen Dore Watson

We who were born / Eiluned Lewis

Spring morning / A. A. Milne

Fern Hill / Dylan Thomas

In the tree house / Amy Dryansky

Toys on the planet Earth / Naomi Shihab Nye

Pine forest / Gabriela Mistral

You begin / Margaret Atwood

Full moon and little Frieda / Ted Hughes

Young apple tree, December / Gail Mazur

What sort of grandmother / Rebecca Okrent

Mythmaker / Natasha Trethewey

He wishes for the cloths of heaven / William Butler Yeats

What are heavy? / Christina Rossetti

The red hat / Rachel Hadas

Almost six / David Stanford Burr

What memories will rise / Judith Steinbergh

On turning ten / Billy Collins

The ball poem / John Berryman

What I learned from my mother / Julia Kasdorf

Perseverance / Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The writer / Richard Wilbur

Prayer for my children / Kate Daniels

Mother to son / Langston Hughes

Blessing the boats / Lucille Clifton

To a daughter leaving home / Linda Pastan

The lake isle of Innisfree / William Butler Yeats

Piano / D. H. Lawrence

After disappointment / Mark Jarman

Eternity / William Blake

The foster child / Mary Rose O'Reilley

The summer day / Mary Oliver

A final affection / Paul Zimmer

Ithaka / Constantine P. Cavafy

I dwell in possibility / Emily Dickinson

Closing credits.