Poems for Waking Up in the Night

You were asleep, and then you were not. Nothing announced it — no noise, no dream you can name, just the ceiling and the clock and the sense that the whole house is further away than it was. These are seven short poems for waking up in the night: not a technique for getting back to sleep, not a rule about screens, just a few quiet lines to keep you company in the hour that feels longest. Read one. The rest will still be here if you wake again.

Seven poems for the middle of the night

One — The Clock Says a Number

The clock says a number
you did not want to see.
Nothing is required of you
at this hour.
Not sleep, not solving.
You have done nothing wrong by being awake.

Two — Awake Is Allowed

You are awake.
That is all that has happened.
No alarm has gone off in the house,
no one is waiting at the door.
The body is still resting
even when the eyes are open.

Three — The List Can Wait Its Turn

Whatever arrived with the waking —
the thing unsaid, the thing undone —
cannot be fixed from here,
and somewhere in you it knows that.
Let it stand at the end of the bed
until the morning gives it somewhere to go.

Four — The House at Three

The house is doing what it always does.
The fridge hums and stops.
A floorboard settles.
None of it means something is wrong.
These are the ordinary sounds of a house
with everyone in it asleep but you.

Five — Nothing to Decide Tonight

There is no decision
that gets better at this hour.
The mind will offer to make one anyway.
You can decline.
Say not now,
and mean it kindly.

Six — The Way Back Down

Sleep is not a door you force.
It is a tide, and it returns
without being called.
Lie still.
Let the breath go long.
It is already on its way back.

Seven — And If It Does Not Come

If it does not come,
the night is still yours to spend.
Lie warm. Let the mind wander somewhere soft.
Rest is not only sleep —
it is also this:
the body still, the day not yet begun.

A short reflection

Waking in the night is ordinary, and it is almost always less serious than it feels at the time. The hour exaggerates: a small worry at three in the morning wears the clothes of a large one, and the mind, with nothing else to do, agrees to the costume. None of these poems will put you back to sleep, and none of them are meant to. They are somewhere quieter to rest your attention while the hour passes on its own — which it does, reliably, whether or not you manage it well. If you read one and then lie there with your eyes open for another half hour, nothing has gone wrong. The night does not keep a record, and neither does the morning; most people who sleep badly on a Tuesday are perfectly ordinary by Wednesday afternoon. If you would like more of the same quiet, there is more in the Journal, written in the same voice for other late hours.

If you would like a few of these to keep, the free reading is here — short poems and a five-minute audio reading in one calm voice, for the next time the house is dark and you are the only one awake in it. And if the middle of the night is a room you find yourself in often, Stillness Is the Door holds more, read aloud the same way.

A note from the Library: these poems are short on purpose. They are meant to be returned to, not finished. — Zen Roots, published by Ledgerstone Press.