Shiloh Nights

In the hours where night blurs the lines of day, and the laws of physics and form are soft and pliable, I often float to you.

I call out and find you, elusive and ageless. The energy of your smile dazzles and carries me into a new place where you comfort me with your presence. You take the form I know, the soft downy boy’s body I crave and adore, you come back to spend some time with me and fill my heart with just enough, so I can keep going in the day, when you’ve gone.

This is my secret – our night meetings where I give you your favourite biscuits and watch the crumbs on your tiny lips. Where your laughter is pure sunshine and your voice is an angel’s. My angel.

Last night you were three. All the memories of you then, so little, came flooding back...
And though it was such a short visit, and you slept in another room, I needed you and you came. I held your tiny warm hand. I draw around your fingernails with my mind. The rough skin at the edge of each round nail, the soft pad of your palms. I breathed you in and held my breath. Though I dreamt a regular dream, somehow we both knew that you had come to help. That I needed your eyes, your skin, your little soul.

And days that hold a silence and a dull gray emptiness, I find myself alone in the car, your song will tease me from the radio, “I will go down with this ship, and I won’t put my hands up and surrendah” I hear your proud little voice singing along. But it is only a memory and the reality of day pierces my senses. Tears roll down my helpless face.



It is only our secret nights where ‘real’ is weak and love is stronger, that I am strengthened. Your power my boy, is bigger than I and this shallow world that you have left.

I love you like my baby and respect you far beyond. At once you are gone and yet you haven’t left me.

When my brave face laughs and I feel the happiness of love, the joy of good friends and good food and the tickle of a gentle breeze, you are the one I cling to inside.

I know in a way that only mystery can answer, that we have traded places. I took care of you here, I wiped your tears away and cuddled you at night, and now you take care of me – soothing my fears and cuddling me in that special place where night blurs the lines of day.