Acquainted With the Night

"You were up a lot last night," my husband said to me this morning as I describe my feeling of out-of-it-ness and of having cotton balls in my eyes. His saying made me think of Robert Frost's poem "I have been one acquainted with the night", and despite my head-numbing sleep-deprivation after being much up with a stuffy nosed infant, I felt the need to write my own version of the poem, with matching meter and rhyme scheme. Maybe better than a cup of coffee? The muse was awake if nothing else is.

Here is Frost's poem, and here is mine:

I have been one acquainted with the night

I've learned to change a diaper with the dark

To spare bleared eyes the glare of night time light.

I've loved a hungry baby in the dark,

Though dull with weariness and ache of sleep,

Love's joy in giving kindle's strength's dim spark

I have been often tired enough to weep

Until the sweetness of small velvet life

Cradled to me, a tiny charge to keep --

All this, to be a mother and a wife

And further to be held in Heaven's sight --

I could not ask for any better life

Than what is given to me. It is right

That I have been acquainted with the night.

Sleeping Mother with Child by Christian Krog, 1883