For a man becoming a father for the first time

The child is not yet born —
just a star in its mother’s belly,
folded in light and ancient breath,
moving between worlds.

And he —
he has felt the shift.

It came not with thunder,
but with stillness.
A weight at the edge of his ribcage.
A question in the bones.

He would never say it aloud,
but part of him wonders:
Will I know how?
To hold. To guide. To love past the edges of fear.
What if I falter?
What if I repeat what was never healed?

And still —
he stays.

Because fear is not a sign of failure.
It is a sign that the soul has woken up.

This is a threshold.
Not a battlefield.
But a sacred ring of fire.

Here, he is being forged —
into presence.

He becomes the one who watches the sky shift,
who keeps the night warm,
who turns silence into steadiness.
The one who makes place ready for someone small to enter.

He is protector.
The one that makes safe this world,
For mother and child to be.

And she —
the mother of the star-child —
she is walking her own myth.
One that bends her body and stretches her soul.
She is the veil and the bridge, the pain and the passage.

And he will be beside her —
not to fix, not to command,
but to hold ground when she cannot,
to gather the pieces when she breaks and reforms,
to honour the goddess in her labour,
and the warrior in her surrender.

He will carry the water.
Speak only when needed.
And speak only truth.

Because his love will not be measured in grand gestures,
but in his willingness to stay when it shakes.
To bear witness when she forgets how radiant she is.

To be the one who says:
I see you. You are becoming. And you do not carry this alone.

When the time comes —
when the veil thins and the first cry tears the world open —
he will not arrive as a finished man.
He will arrive as one who has remembered
his name in the language of stars.

This is what it means to father:
to hold the weight and the wonder,
to break and bless in the same breath,
to build the fire,
and stay.