Daughter Adrift on my Shoulder Painting

Inspired by the poem by David Whyte MY DAUGHTER ASLEEP Carrying a child, I carry a bundle of sleeping future appearances. I carry my daughter adrift on my shoulder, dreaming her slender dreams and I carry her beneath the window, watching her moon lit palm open and close like a tiny folded map, each line a path that leads where I can't go, so that I read her palm not knowing what I read and walk with her in moon light on the landing, not knowing with whom I walk, making invisible prayers to go on with her where I can't go, conversing with so many unknowns that must know her more intimately than I do. And so to these unspoken shadows and this broad night I make a quiet request to the great parental darkness to hold her when I cannot, to comfort her when I am gone, to help her learn to love the unknown for itself, to take it gladly like a lantern for the way before her, to help her see where ordinary light will not help her, where happiness has fled, where faith cannot reach. My prayer tonight for the great and hidden symmetries of life to reward this faith I have and twin her passages of loneliness with friendship, her exiles with home coming, her first awkward steps with promised onward leaps. May she find in all this, day or night, the beautiful centrality of pure opposites, may she discover before she grows old, not to choose so easily between past and present, may she find in one or the other her gifts acknowledged. And so as I helped to name her I help to name these powers, I bring to life what is needed, I invoke the help she'll want following those moonlit lines into a future uncradled by me but parented by all I call. As she grows away from me, may these life lines grow with her, keep her safe, so with my open palm whose lines have run before her to make a safer way, I hold her smooth cheek and bless her this night and beyond it and for every unknown night to come. MY DAUGHTER ASLEEP © David Whyte River Flow New & Selected Poems Many Rivers Press