For my wife Caroline
                              Like hearing parents, some deaf parents
                              also expect to have child who is the same
                              as themselves...[But] how is it possible
                              that parent and child from two such different
                              worlds can meet?
                                            --Paul Preston, Mother Father Deaf

Right now, of everything that's visible
And yet means nothing, this shy man, your father
Deaf since birth, who's watched you for an hour
May be most important. He's been told
His twin daughters, weeks premature, can hear,
But can't believe it yet, not till he sees
Some sign in your response beyond the glass
Dividing him from you. He taps the window,
Sensing its vibration; taps again,
And all the babies twitch. How small your hands
Are, flexing while your sister cries; and now
He knows--elated, saddened--Time to go,
The nurse touches his arm, and so he does,
Though when he finds your mother still asleep,
He'll have nowhere to go except the lobby
Or outside, to smoke....For you, whose newborn
Hands, short-fingered, dense with lines, close now
And fall down at your side, the world is what
Rocks you within its hum, all cries except
Your own drowned out, a bright machinery
That warms you in its shell. You want so much
Just to be held these first days in a world
More like his than you'll ever know again.

             --from Ned Balbo,Galileo's Banquet (Washington Writers' Publishing House: 1998).