A girl is curled into her mother.
The sun has long since gone down.
The night is warm and the room
is lit by a single orange globe
hung above the easy chair.
The girl could not be any closer—
even her ears are curled in
to the voice of her mother.
And if there is a world beyond
the chair in which they sit
and the book they read,
they are not aware of it.
Their imaginations are swirled
together into a world of talking
badgers and valiant mice and
betrayal and war and love.
Fifty years later, that girl
sometimes catches herself staring
in a mirror, stunned by a gratefulness
so deep for her own almost magical story,
a story in which for years she could sit
on her mother’s lap, rapt in a book,
both of them agreeing, just one more page,
and then, just one more.