- Don't go. Don't take away the lights.
- I wanted to say...
- the words are locked in here.
- I have no voice for them.
- But I have hand, paper, pen.
- And what I wanted to tell you is
- my son is asleep in his room,
- breathing quietly, singed pink and gold by the sun.
- smudged with dirt, worn still
- by the speed of his day on Star.
- A simple thing, a child asleep.
- But another reality is close now too.
- An instant changed, a moment turned,
- and I would be having to tell you
- that he was out there with the Beebe children,
- in the sheltering hollow
- where their parents put them so long ago.
- I knew that could be
- when you walked your lanterns around him,
- warming the hard glare of the surgery,
- floating him in this powerful sea of light.
- I let him go then.
- He was free to leave on that good tide
- or to stay.
- This afternoon he asked me how old he had to get
- to be a Pelican.
- I sit here now in your steady glow,
- loving the strength of these thick, plain walls,
- smelling the sea, hearing crickets, gulls, wind,
- and an old man saying that his mother brought him
- to this island when he was a little boy.
- that she is always here for him.
- My son may say such words in this room,
- in another century
- because he is not out there in the hollow tonight,
- not with those eternal children below the rose brambles
- under the sharp stars.
- Listen.
- I want you to know.
- My son is asleep in his room.
