I don’t really follow the royal family much, but I couldn’t help but smile when I saw Prince Harry announce his new baby boy in front of the cameras this week.
A tiny little bull, born in the sign of Taurus to a Leonine Goddess Mother (Meghan is a Leo) and Divine Earth Father (Harry is a Virgo), he is sure to have a charmed life no matter how he decides to live it.
Whenever a new baby is born, I always think of these lines from Sylvia Plath’s Morning Song:
- Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
I love Plath’s vision of being born—that Love is the thing that starts the clock of life, on its glamorous fat gold timer, so that the new distinct voice of a new being can enter the party of human particulars.
Even the most cynical among us can’t help but feel just a little happy about a new baby and the chance to show them life in all its ideal terms.
As I watched Prince Harry speak this week I couldn’t help but think of my own baby boy, born almost two years ago this month, and the chance he has given me to get things right. I feel happy for Harry and Meghan in an air of parental kinship that they too had heard the bald cry of the elements and felt the luck it brings.
Maybe one day their new baby will be a poet and remember the day of his own birth like the great poet Oliver de la Paz has in his poem At the Time of my Birth:
- I wondered how long I could go on
once the rain had stopped. My nerves
were wedged like wings under a hat.
We can only hope that this baby Taurus will be a poet and like all the great Taurean poets before him (Bernadette Mayer, Natasha Trethewey and Adrienne Rich) show us the importance of living a life deeply.
Whatever the case, the great green springish moon has bestowed its blessings on these royals. Rejoice!
Dorothea Lasky, associate professor at the School of the Arts, is the author of six books of poetry and several chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and Boston Review among other places. She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania and has been educated at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Washington University.
This column is editorially independent of Columbia News.
