The Hundred Names of Love
by Annie Lighthart
The children have gone to
bed.
We are so tired we could fold ourselves neatly
behind our eyes and sleep
mid-word, sleep standing
warm among the creatures in the barn, lean
together
and sleep, forgetting each other completely in the velvet,
the
forgiveness of that sleep.
Then the one small cry:
one strike of the
match-head of sound:
one child’s voice:
and the hundred names of love are
lit
as we rise and walk down the hall.
One hundred nights we wake like
this,
wake out of our nowhere
to kneel by small beds in darkness.
One hundred
flowers open in our hands,
a name for love written in each one
