Most poems about an expected baby hurry toward celebration. Dominique Cyprès's "The Art of Expecting" does something quieter and more truthful: it slows down and listens. The title is a pun that the poem slowly unfolds. "Expecting" means both pregnant and hopefully waiting, and the word "art" hints that waiting is a skill to be learned, not just endured.
The opening is loud on the page but gentle in feeling. Imperatives pile up ("speak," "holler," "cry out"), each stronger than the last, and the vocabulary is borrowed from religion. The spirit "moves" you, "possesses" you, "won't let go," as in ecstatic worship or speaking in tongues. The coming child is framed as something overwhelming, almost sacred. Then the second stanza turns the volume down. The speaker will "understand if you are silent," having "hardly spoken" themselves. Who is "you"? At first it seems to be the unborn child, but "your navel" in the third stanza points to a second listener, the pregnant partner, and the pronoun seems to slide between the two. That blur suits the subject, since for the speaker parent and child are almost one presence.
The strangest word in the poem is "scrying." To scry is to gaze into a crystal or a bowl of water for signs of the future. Here it describes staring at a pregnancy test for "a second pink line," and it makes the earlier months sound like fortune-telling, a helpless search for omens. The poem suggests that the silence began when the couple stopped watching so anxiously, though that is an inference. "These long months" carries real weariness either way.
Watching turns out to be the poem's hidden spine. Follow the verbs of seeing and you get a ladder: first "scrying," a guess at signs; then "the shadow of a limb" passing by a navel, an outline glimpsed through skin; finally "your face," promised but not yet given. The poem ends on that word, so the thing still missing gets the last say.
The form supports this patience. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, no punctuation and a lowercase "i," and the missing commas make the lines spill into one another. The third stanza shows it best: "the sun slips fast / across the sky the nights / pass reluctantly the radiators / hiss our child." The reader has to decide where to breathe, and the sentences blur together. Days rush while nights drag, and that contradiction captures how waiting warps time. The radiators suggest a cold season, although the poem never says so. Household noise and the child become one list of things happening in a room, and the child is not set apart as a miracle.
Sound does quiet work too. Sibilants run through the poem: "spirit," "possesses," "slips," "pass," "hiss," "stretches," "squirms," "shadow." Together they make a hush, as though the poem were whispering so as not to disturb what moves beneath the skin. "Hiss" is onomatopoeia, and the radiator's small noise becomes the poem's own.
The final stanza opens with "in another life child," and its repeated "in another life" gives it a gentle chant-like rhythm. Travelling the world and teaching at universities are offered as ambitions the speaker "may have" pursued, hedged by "may" and never claimed as certain losses. "I can leave all that aside" is almost casual, and the small word "until" makes the choice a deferral and not a farewell. This is the shortest stanza and the plainest in diction, and it sounds like a promise made quietly.
The poem's significance lies in what it chooses to dramatise. It skips the test and the birth and dwells in the long middle, where nothing can be done but wait. It turns that hush into something with its own dignity, a state of attention and a kind of love.