I tell my husband I am pregnant and he sets out to make a tiny coffin (1891)

by Stephanie Green

I choose a name: Mhairi or Callum.
He searches the tide-wrack daily for driftwood.

He forbids me to make clothes
But I make sheets for the coffin-crib.

There will be clean linen until the last
while I will rock and croon to my babe

for the few blessed days of its life.
It is God’s will. I shut out imaginings:

the fourth or fifth night,
when the babe gives up sucking;

the seventh, clenched gums,
even for my finger dipped in water.

I am knitting a shawl of such intricacy,
nothing so beautiful will have been seen before.