Keepsakes

I kept my children’s baby teeth,
several of their 000-sized suits,
the lambskin they all slept upon,
the rubber mouse they teethed upon,
the booties that first warmed their newborn feet.

I saved three locks of baby hair
(mementos of how fair and fey they were…)
and albums full of milestone photographs
that hinge together fragments of their pasts
But I couldn’t keep their baby hands and feet…

Yet now I find that other mothers can!
At stalls set up in shopping malls,
sculptors coat with rubber-latex paste
infants’ furrowed wrists and half-clenched fists
(thumbs tucked in, a finger caught uncurling)

And the strange crazed soles, splayed toes, of infant feet.
They peel the moulds off deftly once they’re set,
pack them with a polymorphous mix,
paint the turned-out treasures antique gold
and mount them in a frame against time passing.

Stilled before these priceless miniatures,
I contemplate afresh my newborns’ feet -
their stretch-and-flex, their tissue-paper crinkledness -
the tiny mass that was each daughter’s fist,
the moving artistry of small pink fingers.

©Lesley Walter*

*Lesley Walter is a contemporary Sydney poet whose collection of
motherhood poems, watermelon baby, is available through
Five Islands Press
(PO Box U34, Wollongong University, 2500).