For the New Baby

Reflection by Jennifer Harrison

Dr Jennifer Harrison has published eight poetry collections and co-edited three anthologies of Australian poetry including Motherlode, Australian Women’s Poetry 1986-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann 2009). She has received many awards including the Anne Elder Poetry Award, the NSW Women Writers Prize and the Martha Richardson Poetry Medal. Her most recent book Anywhy was published by Black Pepper, Melbourne (2018). In 2020, she co-edited Australian Poetry Journal Volume 9, Issue 2, DIS—, an anthology of Australian poetry reflecting experience of disability.  Jennifer was honoured with the 2012 Christopher Brennan Award for sustained achievement in Australian poetry.  Jennifer is a neurodevelopmental child psychiatrist working at the Alfred Hospital, Melbourne. She holds honorary fellowships at Monash University, University of Melbourne, and the Dax Centre. In 2011 she founded and continues to manage The Dax Poetry Collection at The Dax Centre, which is situated at University of Melbourne and houses the national collection of art created by people who have experience of mental illness or psychological trauma. 

I’ve been writing poem-for-poem responses to the New Collected Poems of the recently deceased Irish poet Eavan Boland (1944-2020). This poem was written in response to ‘Lullaby’ from an early book of hers, New Territory (1967). I consider these poems to be ‘after-echoes’ of the Boland ones. Of course, the poem is also about me: how I became a grandmother for the first time during the COVID lockdown in Melbourne in 2020. I found great tenderness and wonder in meeting my grandson eventually after lockdown and I have delighted in his growing attachment to me. I find myself watching his development more closely than I have ever noticed before, either at work as a child psychiatrist or within family. I’ve fallen in love with him, perhaps as only a grandmother can. Pristine we are.

For the New Baby

after Eavan Boland’s ‘Lullaby’

By Jennifer Harrison

Person now becoming. Already here.

Named. Arriving.

How truthfully you peer at nothing.

All is sensation, what comes to your lips,

what holds your skin. How being

is a song, already sung, but now

you are listening for the first time.

Your slightness reaches for the future,

undemanding of future’s leanings.

Now you push my arms away, the protest

of self, how you have placed your presence

in the world of meaning. And now

your older arms reach for me

accepting me as safe. Not sage.

There is no room in what we have

for experience or wisdom. All is new.

Untrodden. Trodden before

on snow or sand, but earlier traces

obliterated by new snows, new tides.

These are our new words. Pristine we are.

Together. A moment here and there.

All my life means this. And yet it doesn’t.

The beauty of beginning. The fear

I must hold inside – that such beauty

is vulnerable and not mine 

but should be granted all the fields of corn.