NaPoWriMo 2023 Day 5: Lullaby

Today's prompt...hit a little too close to home. I still don't know if I should have posted this or not, mostly because I'm not happy with it, but also because it's...sensitive subject matter. Here is it anyway. 

Prompt: Finally, here’s our (optional) prompt for the day. Begin by reading Charles Simic’s poem “The Melon.” It would be easy to call the poem dark, but as they say, if you didn’t have darkness, you wouldn’t know what light is. Or vice versa. The poem illuminates the juxtaposition between grief and joy, sorrow and reprieve. For today’s challenge, write a poem in which laughter comes at what might otherwise seem an inappropriate moment – or one that the poem invites the reader to think of as inappropriate.

LULLABY

The roses outside the window
dip and judder like the rise and fall
of her voice as she sings Rosie, Rosie
Ring a ring of Rosies, a pocketful of
Posies, deft hands smoothing the folds
of the white lawn christening dress her sister
embroidered with scarlet rosebuds on the
hem and bodice, bright as blood.
Rosie my darling you'll look beautiful
she croons. Her smile is a white flag
crisp as the dress she readies
for the daughter she will birth 
tomorrow -
a mother who will age and fade
with the years like falling petals
and her child (27 weeks, stillborn)
who never will.