I would like to sing someone to sleep
        Ranier Maria Rilke, from “To Say Before Sleep”

I think it will be a song without words,
or perhaps a song in a language I invent, 
a gently babbling stream. 

If I can open the mouth of my heart, my
hope chest of memory, perhaps a chant 
I learned by heart and sang at evensong 
in some lost monastic life will find voice
and rise to comfort both myself and you.

I may merely hum, voice vibrating deep 
in my chest as I follow the thread of a 
familiar melody I can’t quite recall—
maybe the one I hummed years ago to 
my infant grandson while holding a 
nebulizer over his nose and mouth and 
rocking us both until he hummed back.

If my song does find words, may they 
be words that cradle you as you drift 
through the twilight door that swings 
between day and dark; may they be balm 
to your spirit, soothing you as if you were 
a child again, your head on my shoulder.

And may your breathing time to mine 
as you find the deep room of sleep and 
stay there although the wind moans in 
the eaves, blowing night rain against 
your windows. 

And even when thunder knocks hard at  
your dreams, know that it, too, is simply 
raising its own wordless song.

Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
            Edna St. Vincent Millay

Traveling on the wind distant music chiming 
from the coming ice-cream truck brings me 
good humor—almond-crunch-vanilla popsicle
laughter dripping down my chin those long 
gone summer evenings. 

I sit on our old stone steps, eagerly waiting
for the magic man to stop in front, open the 
small square door, let out a puff of frozen 
smoking air, and plunge his hand in to pull 
out any favorites we children clamor for.

Who are the others waiting with me in that 
kingdom lost to decades now, shadowy figures 
leaping on the edge of dusk? Childhood is the 
kingdom where nobody dies? For some that may 
be true, but sometimes they do die, you know— 

pets, parents, grandparents, even classmates
here one day, gone the next. Yet in the endless 
summers of that kingdom, ice-cream always 
comes to us on time, promising a treat we can 
savor before dark—before it can melt away.

Somewhere in an indigo ocean 
a mother whale is singing love 
into her newborn calf. 

I swim into the video, glimpse two
ghostly figures gliding through deep
sea shadows. Her haunting cadences 

wash over me, ethereal song rising 
and falling in arcs that echo the flow 
of slow-moving underwater waves. 

I want the universe to sing like this whale.
Perhaps these creatures came here from 
another galaxy, a planet made of water, 

bringing with them songs of home passed
down through generations, melodies we 
almost remember that call us to follow.

This ocean is twilight. The mother and 
child—twin planets orbiting a single star, 
and we are their moons.