Procession of the Equinoxes

My little bird, before you were born,
I took a long walk in the woods
to bring on labour. It was later
than this: the elms were sharper
and more yellow. Still. Today
there is a fullness in the world:
the raspberry leaves, the sumac
starting to turn into the birth season,
the season of heaviness and seeds.

It didn't work, the walking. You came
in your own time, and by the time
we made it home, it was November,
a week of sideways rain. Still.
in my heart the year is pinned
on that yellow day -- the way the sky
is pinned on the north star,
and turns around her.

Though each turning moves.
It's different from the way July
is fixed, as if in salt. Every year
in stale heat my sister is thirty
and freshly dead. My heart's bird
when you are thirty, she
will be thirty, and who will mourn,
then, when even the pole star
has moved on.