Letters from a Young Father. Edoardo Ponti

and his own mother, recalling powerfully what they have given to him in the life leading to this moment.

      Just as crucially, the poems of Letters from a Young Father emerge as spare epistles in which Edoardo Ponti searches for any lasting understanding that he might pass along to his child as he considers the dimensions and dilemmas of our existence in a complex world. He offers his own experience interwoven with loving and modest notes of instruction about those ways one might choose to live ethically and faithfully in this world.

      Letters from a Young Father is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful books of recent years. If I were to choose just one book to give to a new father or to a new mother at the beginning of his or her journey to becoming a parent, it would be, without question, Edoardo Ponti’s Letters from a Young Father.

      —David St. John

       BEFORE THE BEGINNING

      I.

      You are not the first

      The sun has kissed nor the last

      But we will hold you and kiss you

      Like the very first and the very last

      No wind has blown through your hair

      No ground has touched your feet

      But you are in our every step

      & all the air

      You are still beyond time

      But in our eyes you are already forever

      Neither boy nor girl

      We raise your tiny heart to the sun

      & offer the promise of you to the sky

      To the earth & to the wind

      Let them bless those fresh first heartbeats

      Those tiny knocks on our door

      Born from courage

      And the faith

      Of this new soul called

      You

      II.

      Before the beginning there was

      A morning overlooking the Pacific

      A small room with open windows

      Sunlight softened by a veil of clouds

      Before the beginning there was

      A ring of coffee mugs on the bedside table

      Silence of skin spreading through sheets

      Eyes reading the movements of shadows

      Before the beginning there was

      A man and a woman with no map to connect

      A chance meeting—A number

      On a napkin and the first phone call

      Before the beginning there was

      Paris and pain—There was the courage to love

      The blind leap of faith not so blind after all

      Before the beginning

      There was your mother—There was me

      And all the false starts

      That paved our separate ways

      So we could find each other

      Before the beginning

      There was another world—A whole other me

      Before the beginning

      There was already you