a goodnight

It's been a good night with the kids, tantrums, tornado warnings and all. I'm full of hope for them, and longing for the light in their eyes to stay bright and for them to be blessed with the kind of love they need and hearts that will support them in whatever's ahead.

But I've only been with them three nights. Can you imagine the strength of a parent's wishing for their child? Of our parents', for us? How they must long to be able to come into our lives and show us the way--even if they don't know it? How intimately they feel our happiness and our suffering? And yet, in our moments of pain, how they have to admit that they can't save us from it. Hope that they've prepared us well. Put faith in the strength we've yet to find. Hope that the world brings us good; have faith that we'll get through the bad (and keep hoping and believing in the good). Have faith that we'll understand why they have to stand aside and let us grow...and in all of it, knowledge that though they first gave birth to us, we have to then give birth to ourselves.

I'm sure that's not enough nuance to describe it. Believe it or not, I'm trying to get less poetic and more real. None of this is ever as easy or simple or even fulfilling as it sounds. The narrating is always easier than the living out. But the narrating also re-establishes direction and re-affirms hope where you find it. So I'll do that. And then fall asleep.

The Writer
by Richard Wilbur


In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.