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Robert Kinslow Poem
I hope you slept,
not because the night was gentle
we both know it rarely is,
but because some part of you
the part that still remembers how to trust
slipped past the sentinels of thought
and found the older room inside the mind
where rest is not earned, only permitted.
I hope your breath discovered its own metre,
unhurried iambs drifting over the shallow shoals
of cortisol and unclosed questions,
each exhale a small vote of confidence
that the world would continue turning
even if your eyes stayed open.
I hope the darkness, for once,
was not a prosecutor.
That it forgot to catalogue your failures,
and instead behaved like velvet
absorbing sound, softening edges,
holding every unsent message and every unsaid apology
without demanding verdict or reply.
If sleep came only in fragments
ten-minute islands between two rogue waves of dread
I hope you felt, in the narrow space between heartbeats,
that you were not being required to win the night,
only to endure it with something like dignity,
which is to say: without pretending.
And if no real sleep arrived at all,
if you simply lay there bearing witness
to the slow machinery of worry grinding on,
then know this:
that stillness, too, is a form of courage.
A refusal to flee.
A quiet, stubborn hospitality
extended even to the parts of yourself
that arrived uninvited and would not leave.
I hope some filament of warmth reached you
perhaps the memory of a hand once laid across your back,
or the absurd loyalty of your own pulse,
still counting, still here,
still willing to begin another day
on your behalf.
Sleep or no sleep,
you were not alone in that dark.
I was there in the way one mind can sit
beside another without speaking
holding the same hour,
breathing the same difficult air,
loving you exactly as fiercely
as the night tried to convince you
you were unlovable.
Rest now, if even a little.
The darkness has had its turn.
Let something kinder take the next watch.
Copyright © Robert Kinslow | Year Posted 2026
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