Sleepless Pantoum

Laurel Nakanishi

The ʻōlauniu breeze lifts voices from the night.
Dogs curl under their houses. The city
burns to the shore, red with distant industry.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons. 

Even the dogs curl into sleep. Even the city.
We watch the headlights swipe past our window.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons
or their eclipse—night opening to night. 

Headlights skirt across our window
trailing the scent of gas. Sometime past 2am, 
I feel eclipsed. Night reaches out to night
drawing me back to the hospital room,

the scent of my baby’s matted hair. Past 2am,
I held his tiny body and we floated in a silence
that whirred and pinged. In the dark hospital,
in my exhaustion, I heard singing emerge. 

I held his tiny body, floating through a silence 
not silent, but a greeting from this other land, 
this one long night where we’d emerged.
He opened his eyes and his gaze was steady—

a greeting, a land. I began to weep. His body
against mine was too small for the weight 
of his gaze, his steady eyes—a doorway 
between our nights, and through it, voices.

Copyright © 2025 by Laurel Nakanishi. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 10, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

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about this poem

“When my child was first born, I did not sleep for months. Like many new parents, I was thrust into an orbit with a tiny human at its center. Up until this point, I had found myself hardening to the world—the sensationalism in the news, the despair of climate change, all the ways we fail each other and ourselves. But now, here was this baby, soft, open, and fragile. Here, this poem invites us to soften as well and listen for what might emerge.”
—Laurel Nakanishi

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