Christening readings

More tomorrow about the fabulously moving christening of Miss Hannah Mead Gilheany, but I wanted to post parts of two of the readings which I just adored. Each godparent chose a reading, and Alison and Launa’s were both from poems I love and had forgotten about. Excerpts from each:

“The Writer” by Richard Wilbur (Alison Lobron)
…In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwhale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it is heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

“You Begin” by Margaret Atwood (Launa Schweizer)
This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.
Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.