You cry, ‘One more story!’, before you go to sleep.
You lie in your bed and sniffle, if I say we don’t have time.
Your sleepy little mind won’t rest, won’t turn off the lights unless
You round off the day’s experience, like a rhyme, with one more story.
We leave the room, in mourning,
Because although we might sometimes say
‘Tomorrow’s another day’,
We shall not see that day, for in closing our eyes, thinking stops.
In sleeping we die, and in waking, are reborn.
There is no future, and no past. Only a series,
An infinite procession of present moments
During some of which (a set), you and I are present.
So why do some fear death? In that moment,
We may sleep, and the present will roll on.
Perhaps the future and the past are the
imaginations of the departed?
The moment when I reach my own finale:
Perhaps I’ll sit up slightly in my bed,
And others may gather round and cry
And admit (perhaps) that such a moment is sad
Because it is the last of its kind;
The last in a set of present moments with you.
This is the end of the story, and (we think)
Some eternal law has decreed ‘only one story’ before the big sleep.
This may be so,
But in our small world; our four walls:
(My daughter) I will sit with you in your bed,
And read you another story; one more,
So you and I may dream together in this moment
And prolong a happiness that may not be replayed.
(My love), I will lie with you in our bed,
And we will talk all night, until morning rolls again from under the earth
And we have (by doing so) cheated death and sleep
And still live — as we were yesterday, in this fresh morning.
Wow, fantastic! I really enjoyed the easy braiding of sleep as various strands of being/not-being, the intimate dance of father and child, the reaching-out to embrace an elusive now, and the imagery in finale of cheating death by refusing sleep — such a youthful notion.
I would live like this and only sleep when overcome by exhaustion. Could there be a better example for our children?
I loved reading this again, this time with the photo… makes me nostalgic for England, where children wear sweaters (hmm, can’t remember the English name for a sweater…. cardigan?) in the house. Oh wait… is it jumper?
From the picture, I’d call that a ‘cardigan’, but yes, the generic term is ‘jumper’. :)
This is beautiful. I’ve been thinking a lot about death and our perceptions of the one true inevitability. We recently had to explain the push and pull of sadness and relief that comes in death for many to our two oldest after my in-laws had to put their dog to sleep. Interesting that we referred to it as sleep. It evolved into a much broader topic that included how fragile our moments together can be, and it left me more appreciative of each of those moments, much like this poem.