Vespers
Published by Motherlore Magazine, October 2024
You seem tinier in the purple darkness than in daylight’s bright tussle
where everything about you fills the space like rolling smoke.
Now, here, your hands stretch overhead in restful praise
shadow universes swirl behind new cells renewing and renewing
big ideas swell and settle around small bones
tiny lungs pump blood to growth and greatness
ears like smooth pearled seashells
waiting for the wave and the wash.
In this porcelain peace of night, you are still my baby -
away from the out-the-door, into-bed, behaving, stop-raging,
stop-wanting stop-asking be-faster kind of love, away from
the gentles and carefuls and pleases and thankyous
that I sculpt and smother you with, thinking that I know best.
But here baby, let it rage. Cross kingdoms of wonder and dark
that are only yours to find, ride the tides of sleep
into soft-grass dreams not the spikey, shouty ones
make chains from daisies thumbnailed into necklaces
spin stories together with the water and the music and the light.
Outside: the sun sinks the day to ground, the trees rustle lullabies.
Outside: the stars pump blood into their long moonlit fingers.
I pull the covers up to your chest, whisper ‘goodnight, I love you’
now freed from all my waspy invitations and litany of no’s
and I want to say: take it all, be it all, you are it all - but words won’t do.
Outside: crocuses push through wet earth, ivy breaks brick
seeds float in the wind looking for a home, outside: the earth trembles
a concert for your wildness, which waits for you when you wake,
and the full night holds all the excesses of wonder that I cannot.
One breath invites another, you turn and murmur as I leave.
This morning, you made a butterfly on my bedroom wall with your hands:
ten tiny fingers that fluttered into focus before the creature grew
and blurred and vanished in an instant - a passing shadow painted
and absorbed by the brilliant morning sun.
An extra note
As a mother of small, spirited children, the days can feel wild—often beginning at 6am and rolling forward in an on-on-on rhythm that leaves little space to pause, let alone drink a cup of tea while it’s still hot. It’s not bad; it’s just a lot. And somehow, and some days, you don’t truly take in your child until they are finally asleep.
This poem is about my brilliant, bold, larger-than-life eldest daughter, who was four at the time. In the daytime, she fills every corner of the room—new ideas spilling out of her, constant conversation, climbing, running, raging, a force of nature entirely herself. And at that age, boundaries are beginning to form: what’s okay, when no means no, how to be kind, how to want but also wait. It’s a delicate balance—trying to let your child be wholeheartedly who they are, while also guiding them toward the kind of behaviour you know the world deems acceptable.
But at night, everything shifts. In sleep, she becomes my baby again—still, peaceful, infinite. It’s then that I see her most clearly, free from the negotiations and no’s of the day, and I feel an almost overwhelming desire to give her everything, to let her be everything. The poem lives in that contrast: the fierce fullness of her waking hours, and the vast tenderness of her sleeping ones. It also touches on the passage of time—the way our children are constantly becoming new versions of themselves, each one replacing the last like a ‘passing shadow painted / and absorbed by the brilliant morning sun’.
Vespers was first published by the wonderful Motherlore Magazine and now features in my chapbook Sunlight Later. If you like this one, you might also like Watching Dumbo in Yokohama which follows a similar theme.