A child's midnight panic is the kind of small event most families forget by breakfast, yet Jerry Kraft builds a whole poem from it. A little girl wakes, scuttles upstairs with a blanket over her head "so monsters / can't see her," and burrows into her parents' bed. The speaker, who seems to be her father, lies beside them and listens. By the end, the person being comforted is not only the child. The poem's central idea is that night strips grown-ups back to children, so that soothing a frightened daughter becomes a way of talking yourself into courage.
The opening is vivid and affectionate. The line break in "afraid of the dark / fullness of empty rooms" lets "dark" stand alone for a moment before "fullness" arrives, and the phrase captures a child's logic, in which an empty room is crowded with invisible things. The blanket trick follows the same logic: if I can't see them, they can't see me. The best image is "cold-toed fears re-warm," which gives fear a pair of feet and lets it thaw under the covers. Sound does quiet work too. "Scuttles" sounds like a small animal, and "slow pulse" and "even rhythm" turn the parents' heartbeats into a lullaby. The father hopes his own steadiness "might steady them both," and "both" matters here. He is already half-admitting that he needs steadying too.
The poem is unrhymed free verse in four stanzas of seven lines each, a tidy shape that suggests the bed holding everyone in. Within it, sentences spill over line endings, often breaking on small, hesitant words like "Mother's," "old" and "bright," so the reading never quite settles. The mood turns at "Oh, I know dark corners." Now it is "the dead hours of night, / when we are all children," and the clocks are "ticking chants of fearsome things." What follows is a run of sentences that all begin "That...": that no one will hear, that life will be too short, that love will come too late, that "small acts will / foolishly squander great things." The repetition mimics a mind spiralling at three in the morning, and the fears have grown up. Monsters have given way to regret and mortality. Only one line glints, "bright / answers too often hide in fearsome places," and it quietly prepares the ending.
That ending is where the grammar loosens most. The list of fears runs into "That we'll falter / beneath the weight of courage, and the tears, / and the hard climb, and all our stifled cries, / are wrapped in my arms." Strictly speaking the sentence loses its way, since the tears and cries seem to become the things he holds. I read this as the poem's meaning leaking through its syntax, because the child's fears and the adult's are now one bundle in a single embrace. "The weight of courage" is also a striking phrase, treating bravery as a load as well as a virtue. The comma after "grownup voices," followed by a capital "The only way," seems to slide us from the father's narration into the words he says aloud.
Those words are the real risk of the poem. "The only way to not be afraid is to dare to be / more brave" is close to circular, since it tells you to be braver in order to be less afraid. Then the line repeats itself: "the only way, the only way." It sounds like a lullaby, but it also sounds like a man persuading himself, and the repetition suggests he is not entirely sure. There is no dawn, no monster banished, no neat lesson.
That honesty is what gives the poem its value. It takes a scene almost every parent will recognise and makes room for something less often admitted: adults do not outgrow the dark, they just learn to speak to it in calmer voices. The writing is occasionally rough, with phrases like "dark night beings" a little clumsy. But the roughness fits a poem about holding on in the middle of the night, offering a child the only comfort available, which is that someone close by is awake and afraid too, and staying anyway.