St Bride’s

So this is women’s work: folding
and unfolding, be it linen or a selkie-
skin tucked behind a rock. Consider

the hare in jizzen: her leverets’ ears
flat as the mizzen of a ship
entering a bottle. A thread’s trick;

adders uncoil into spring. Feathers
of sunlight, glanced from a butterknife
quiver on the ceiling,

and a last sharp twist for the shoulders
delivers my daughter, the placenta
following, like a fist of purple kelp.

Kathleen Jamie, from an anthology of poems about child birth, called, all the poems you need to say hello. it's the double rhyme of jizzen and mizzen that makes it.