Tiredness
by Theodora Goss

Tiredness has its own beauty.
It is late, so late, and I have at last
done my duty, fulfilled
whatever needed fulfilling, completed
the tasks of the day. Now, at last, darkness
can come, and I can wrap myself in it,
as though in a warm blanket.

Now, at last, I can sleep
on comfortable pillows, between
cool sheets, well-worn, freshly-laundered,
knowing I am free to enter
that other country, its dark shore
separated from this one only
by the river of forgetting.

(The illustration is by Emma Florence Harrison.)