Your Birth, My Joy Poem by Egbert Simcox

Your Birth, My Joy

Days are those little markers,
Like railroad ties clicking
Our moment's transit from crib to ash,
Each bearing twenty-four hours of light and dark
Grappling under an arbitrating sun,
Then melding into a seamless ribbon of years.
But there is one day that shouts glory
Among the unexceptional thousands
That have throbbed unheard beneath me.
The unknowing would say that day
You first glimpsed light was like any other.
Not for me, not now, not ever.
Living in drought, I foretasted abundance still unknown
When you that crowned day, that instant,
Joined my arid world.
I had drifted dully among the despair of days
Until your day's bright immanence
Unfolded decades down the meander of years.
Your birth, portal to my triumph,
The advent of a partner in a love
That I had never known,
One that even now grows in a grace
Beyond my understanding.
Only God can make such resplendence
Among the tedium of ordinary days,
Lighting the first and greatest of your gifts to me.