The Poem That Made My Daughter Stop Crying
She was four, and the poem was about a dog we'd never met.
My daughter was four and she was crying the way four-year-olds cry, the kind of crying that has no reason and no end. She had been crying for an hour and nothing worked, not the bottle, not the song, not the drive around the block in the car seat.
I was exhausted and out of ideas and I opened the book of poems that was on the shelf, the one I had been meaning to read for months, and I read her the first poem I found. It was about a dog, a specific dog, a dog that the poet had seen on a street corner and never met.
She stopped crying. Not gradually, not slowly, but the way a tap turns off. She stopped crying and she listened, and I read the poem again, and she listened again, and then she fell asleep.
I have never understood why that poem worked. It was not about her, or about us, or about anything she had ever seen. It was about a dog on a street corner, and it was written by a stranger, and it was the thing that made my daughter stop crying.
I have thought about it for years. The poem worked because it was a story, and a story is the thing a four-year-old can hold. It worked because it was specific, and specific is the thing that makes a story real. It worked because it was about a dog, and a dog is the thing a four-year-old can love without having to know it.
She is nine now and she still asks for the dog poem. She knows it by heart, the way you know a song by heart, and she reads it to herself sometimes when she cannot sleep. The poem is not about her. It is about a dog she never met. But it is hers now, the way a poem is the thing that finds you when you need it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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