A Lullaby of Love and Light
Sleep, My Daughter
Please close your eyes now, my little one.
Do not cry.
Let the night hold you gently.
Feel my arms around you,
not just as flesh and bone,
but as a sheltering sky,
as the earth cupping a young root
against the cold breath of loss.
Rest.
My love is the hush between heartbeats,
the slow warmth of embers,
that refuse to go dark.
Your mother is not gone from us.
She has only changed her distance.
She is like the sun at dawn,
no longer in the room,
yet still warming the walls of our lives.
Her light arrives without asking,
touching us where memory lives.
Sleep now, my child.
Growing without her;
It’s like a sapling learning the sky
from the shade.
You will reach upward with questions.
Your small hands will cling to mine,
while still aching for the softness,
they once knew.
Your body will grow strong,
even as your heart remembers
the shape of her embrace.
Life teaches us slowly.
It asks patience, not courage.
Even roses learn beauty
by opening in the cold.
There is no hurry, my daughter.
Time walks differently with children.
You will become yourself
In your own quiet season.
I wrap you now
in a shawl woven from many colours,
the colours your mother loved,
the colours she left behind,
in laughter, in kindness, in you.
I place over you
a blanket of dawn-gold,
warm as first light
touching closed eyes.
You are held.
You are safe.
Love surrounds you,
the way the ocean holds the moon’s reflection,
vast, patient, unbroken.
Dream of a place without edges.
A place soft as milk and silence,
where her love moves like gentle waves,
never leaving the shore of you.
Where fear dissolves
the way snow forgets itself
under spring sunlight.
Let my voice carry you there.
Let memory become a lamp,
not a wound.
Sleep now, my little girl.
She watches over you
the way the moon watches the night,
not touching,
yet never turning away.
Lift your dreams upward, my child.
Imagine a cradle of clouds,
light as breath,
waiting just for you.
Lie there, quiet, trusting,
as she once held you,
heart to heart.
And I will come to you too.
Along a thin silver path of moonlight,
a thread sewing love into the dark.
I will stay near,
sometimes visible,
sometimes only felt,
like a shadow that knows,
when to step forward
and when to disappear.
Your mother is the whisper
that moves the leaves.
She is the hush before dawn,
the lullaby hidden in the wind.
She is the star
that burns brighter
because the night is deep.
Sleep now, my precious daughter.
Without tears.
Without fear.
Love does not end.
It only learns new ways to stay.
My heart carries both of you,
her absence,
your becoming.
Sleep, my sweet child,
wrapped in a love,
stretching from earth to sky,
from memory to tomorrow.