Late night in the guest room, between our hosts’ 
Bedroom & the nursery where their toddler 
Calls & calls, we lie awake, struggling to trust
This new parenting, never taking the child 
Into bed, not soothing her when she wails,
Allowing her to exhaust herself toward sleep.

That same cry rose across fields at Antietam, 
Those wounded boys so far from home, 
One voice triggering another, mama! 
Like a series of muffled explosions
Echoing into the future where I hear
Tyre Nichols & all our dying citizens
Keening from the crib, their weak bleating
Unanswered though never-ending, our country
Awake or maybe sleeping, as we are not. 

⸺

Michael Waters is the author of Pagan Sky: New & Selected Poems 2000-2025 and The Bicycle and the Soul: Prose on Poetry, and co-editor of Border Lines: Poems of Migration.

This article appears in April 2026.

Joe Hoover, S.J., is America’s poetry editor and producer of a new film, “The Allegory.”