Poetry by Shivpreet Singh
I share a narrow bed with my son,
rain ticking against the window the night before I leave.
Boston is now his city, a place
where his life will grow its roots
between the T-line and brick apartments.
California waits, while I lie awake,
listening to the tide of his easy sleep-breath,
wondering when the beds we share
became fewer than the beds we don’t.
The ancient bard says everything
is singing—though sometimes the song
is a chair keeping still
under the weight of a jacket,
or the AC humming its hymn
before anyone wakes up.
Everything is singing—
which is another way of loving—
but loving in small ways, in whispers:
a teabag steeping its bronze sigh,
a dog nosing a shoe by the door,
a lamp leaning its warm parenthesis
of light over an open page.
Notice how things love things in whispers.
The moon, barely tugging the tides,
still keeps the ocean’s confidence.
The sparrow, not the hawk,
stitches the sky with its daily thread.
Even my son’s steady sleeping—
how it steadies me,
a lullaby he offers without a sound.
Shivpreet Singh is a Sikh translator, musician, and poet born in Kathmandu, raised in Delhi and San Jose. His work blends genre-bending music with English translations of poetry from half a dozen languages and new poems. His poetry and music stream tens of millions of minutes worldwide. Many of his poems stage conversations with “ancient bards” who appear in shifting forms. After a career in science and finance, he has devoted the past decade to his poetry and music in a small casita studio at the front of his home in San Ramon, California.
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