While I am Waiting

I have such a generous uterus, who'd very much like to not make me nervous. So while I sleep, she quietly practices her contracting. But sometimes I awake to her unmistakable quake and wait for the clutching to dull before rolling onto my left hip and folded arm. The bones within my extremities are drowning in blood. "Insurance," my midwife calls it. A reserve of red for my veins to drink from, were they to thirst after I deliver baby from womb to world. How strange to become one again. To lay on my belly and fear falling down the stairs less. To separate. The day she's due moans like a war horn. When will my loins shake her from me? When will I lay her to sleep in a dry bed of sheets, swaddled in printed cotton, while breath circles her mouth? When will I touch the hair on her head, kiss her cheeks, see her? I am not ashamed to make the claim that perhaps these ten months of witnessing the wisdom of my anatomy as it constructs a person, might be the greatest of my little life's work.