First draft, very rough....
Sophie
My bairn
My little orator
Before you could talk
You conversed in the art
Of blowing raspberries!
At 18 months you stunned nanna
With your recital of “The owl and the pussycat”
So, I stood up my bonnie lass
When one day the words came out gobbledigook.
One minute bouncing up and down
On ma and da’s bed
The next lying on the sofa
A mottled translucence
"Eee look at those sausages"
Except they were uncle Dave's fingers
In an hour in a hospital bed
No words then, no chitter chatter
Little noises, heavy laden eyes.
A night of uncertainty
Mottles morphing into ghastly ink spots
In ever increasing numbers
I looked at your limbs wondering if
They will always be there.
Then an unlikely saviour arrives
With his posse of ashen faced helpers
A man whose eloquence, unlike you my pet
Was not his strong point
Blunt yet exquisitely logical
He pronounced that action was now needed.
Then the strange and painful little worms
Were fed with difficulty into your beautiful veins
And the fight began
Three days and three nights you lay
Moaning and cursing in your fathers arms
Your little “pea in a pod”
Mam nursed a new born sis
Trying not to think....the unthinkable
Eventually the lesions faded
A few little craters remind us
Inanother 3 weeks you walked again
And now...What of you now my little darling?
All age six of you?
Well, now, what bliss, we can’t get a word in edgeways!
http://www.meningitis.org/