Lullaby

The upland falls behind the house, 

live and scrub oak, barbed wire 

firmly implanted stringing unlikely 

trees together, terrace by terrace, 

down and down, white rock
gleaming through the green. 

The art of memory, they say, 

is to forget. So sleep now, 

smile and sleep and let me 

think, sleep past the molecules 

of grief, let me kneel and believe,

believe and submit. 

Soon enough you'll know hunger, 

then sweetness, then a sweet 

hunger for what reaches 

out to touch. Soon, too, 

those poor, nerveless times,

those times when you curse 

and strike out at yourself, 

when you count up wrongs 

and feed them as if they were 

one prairie fire. As I sit 

and watch you sleep,
I grow angry, too, 

at my abstraction of your sorrow, 

at its necessity, at the very idea 

of what I cannot speak,
it's so unspeakable.

So sleep and smile,
sleep deep.

--Ralph Burns (1949- ), Oklahoma-born American poet and former professor at the University of Arkansas- Little Rock, from Poetry magazine, November 1988.