Ten short lines carry a whole relationship, from the first jolt of attraction to a shared bed three years on. A speaker crosses a campus in the sun, notices the words on a sign worn by someone else, and feels something stir. Then the poem jumps ahead to pregnancy and a plain, astonished conclusion: "miracles. / alla time, miracles." Its central idea is that the extraordinary doesn't arrive with fanfare. It grows out of small, almost embarrassingly ordinary moments, like a walk, a glance, or a touch on the hand.
The poem's most useful trick is the way it moves inward. At the start the body is touched only from outside: "sun warm on my hair." Next comes the "hungry place inside me," a phrase that turns desire into appetite, something the speaker lacks and didn't know she lacked. Then the touch becomes personal, "you touched my hand," and by the end the movement has reached its deepest point: "your child wiggling inside me." The word "inside" appears twice, and the two uses answer each other. The first names an emptiness, the second a fullness. The hunger of the opening line has been fed.
The parenthesis in the middle is where the poem is most delicate. Everything that matters happens in brackets: "(I stopped tearing leaves / when I realized. / you touched my hand 'yes')". Tearing leaves is a small nervous action, the sort of thing hands do when the mind is elsewhere or the body is restless. Stopping it marks the moment of understanding, and the poet never needs to say what was realized. The brackets make the memory feel half-whispered, like an aside to the beloved, as though the speaker is remembering it while lying beside them. The punctuation is also quietly odd. A full stop after "realized" is followed by a lowercase "you," and the quoted "yes" has no closing period. The "yes" could be what the touch says, or what the speaker answers. That ambiguity helps, because in a moment like this one gesture does the work of a whole conversation.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short and uneven, and they read like speech that stops and starts. Still, the sound is carefully handled. "Warm," "words" and "wore" share a soft w, and "hair," "hungry" and "hand" form a line of h sounds running through the first half. The effect is gentle and breathy, which suits a moment of attraction. The word choices are plain throughout. "Wiggling" is especially striking, because it is not a lofty word. It is playful and physical, the way a real pregnant body feels a baby move, and it keeps the poem away from sentimentality.
The ending relies on tone. "Miracles" is a big word, but the poem undercuts any grandness by writing "alla time," a spoken, slurred version of "all the time." The speaker doesn't announce a miracle in a hushed voice. She says it the way you might mention the weather, which suggests that wonder has become part of daily life. Splitting the word onto its own line, then repeating it, gives a double beat: first the amazed gasp, then the settled, almost laughing second thought. Even the numeral in "3 years later" feels like a note jotted down rather than a polished poetic flourish.
One small detail deserves attention: "your child," not "our child." It may simply be an affectionate way of giving the baby to the person who inspired it, or it may carry a hint of wonder that something of this other person is now growing inside the speaker. Either way, it stresses the closeness of the two bodies.
What makes the poem significant is how much it trusts a reader. It skips the courtship, the conversations and the years between, and leaves only a hand, a sign, a patch of sun and a kick. By compressing so much into so little, it suggests that a life can turn on a moment that looked like nothing at the time.