Adrienne Rich - Night-Pieces: For a Child lyrics

The Crib you sleeping I bend to cover
Your eyelids work i see
Your dream, cloudy as a negative
Swimming underneath
You blurt a cry your eyes
Spring open, still filmed in dream
Wider, they fix me -
-death's head, sphinx, medusa? You scream
Tears lick my cheeks, my knees
Droop at your fear mother I no more am
But woman, and nightmare

Her Waking tonight I jerk astart in a dark
Hourless as Hiroshima
Almost hearing you breathe
In a cot three doors away

You still breathe, yes -
And my dream with it's gift of knives
It's murderous hider and seeker
Ebbs away, recoils

Back into the egg of dreams
The vanishing point of mind all gone

But, you and I - swaddled in a dumb dark
Old as sickheartedness
Modern as pure annihilation -

We drift in ignorance
If I could hear you now
Mutter some gentle animal sound!
If milk flowed from my breast again