lovepoem #4
Lullaby
(My mother wrote this lullaby
for my oldest sister, on her first
Christmas,1925.)
Sleep, little baby, the daylight
is fading;
Dim yellow stars the dark
heavens adorn;
Once, long ago, in a
Bethlehem manger
The little Lord Jesus was born.
Lullaby, lullaby, sleep, little
baby, sleep.
Sleep, little baby, my arms are
about thee,
A circle of love which enfolds
thee secure;
So Mary cradled the wee
baby Jesus,
The little Lord Jesus, so pure.
Lullaby, lullaby, sleep, little
baby, sleep.
Sleep, little baby, thine eyelids
are drooping,
Thy warm, tender body relaxing
to rest;
Jesus thus slept in the arms of
sweet Mary,
His dear little head on her breast.
Lullaby, lullaby, sleep, little
baby, sleep.
Lullaby, lullaby, sleep, little
baby, sleep.
© Jacqueline Jackson 2006
Loss can defeat us or serve as the impetus for positive change. Here, Sue Ellen Thompson of Connecticut shows us how to mourn inevitable changes, tuck the memories away, then go on to see the possibility of a new and promising chapter in one’s life.
No Children, No Pets
I bring the cat’s body home from the vet’s
in a running-shoe box held shut
with elastic bands. Then I clean
the corners where she has eaten and
slept, scrubbing the hard bits of food
from the baseboard, dumping the litter
and blasting the pan with a hose. The plastic
dishes I hide in the basement, the pee-
soaked towel I put in the trash. I put
the catnip mouse in the box and I put
the box away, too, in a deep
dirt drawer in the earth.
When the death-energy leaves me,
I go to the room where my daughter slept
in nursery school, grammar school,
high school,
I lie on her milky bedspread and think
of the day I left her at college, how nothing
could keep me from gouging the melted
candle-wax
out from between her floorboards,
or taking a razor blade to the decal
that said to the firemen, “Break
this window first.” I close my eyes now
and enter a place that’s clearly
expecting me, swaddled in loss
and then losing that, too, as I move
from room to bone-white room
in the house of the rest of my life.
Reprinted from Nimrod International Journal: The Healing Arts (Vol. 49, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 2006) by permission of the author. Copyright © 2006 by Sue Ellen Thompson, whose latest book is The Golden Hour (Autumn House Press, 2006). This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
Ted Kooser served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004-2006. For more information, go to www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.
This article appears in Dec 21-27, 2006.
