Like a cat she curled around her boy,
pulling him close to warm and feed him,
hoping that when company came, curious
and laden with gifts that no baby needs
unless they could be swapped for things more
useful, like clothes in graduating sizes and blankets,
–you can never have too many blankets—
though to tell the truth a stack of diapers would be
best of all, and after that a proper cradle,
she might lift his tiny hand for a tiny wave and
perhaps reveal his tiny face for the chorus
of ooos and aaaahs, without letting them
see that all she had to wrap him in was cloth torn
from her clothes, and when he wasn’t in her arms
he slept in a manger on a pile of fresh hay.
After all she’d been through, scorn was not welcome.
© Dana Hughes 1.7.15
Furthermore... 
You have such a gift for rendering momentous things in intimate language. This is a mother’s unique perspective–and a young, poor mother, at that. This angle of vision would never have occurred to me, an old white guy whose acquaintance with such maternal intimacies is now reified in memory. I have noted before your capacity to stretch a sentence poetically to its breaking point in order to gather a larger field of observation in a single look; you do it again here, with warmth and yet a growing sense of practicality, then shame, and ultimately smoldering resentment at the potential disdain of others. I think that’s why your separate final sentence jumps off the page at me: in a flash, you move the Mother from maternal intimacy to maternal protectiveness, from vulnerability to ferocity, Madonna to Mother Bear. I have not quite knelt at this manger before.