“The Child That Saved Me” by Rediet Giday
April 9, 2025
In darkness when sleep betrays me, I rock— pendulum of flesh and memory—like tidewaters against limestone, recreating my mother’s womb. At seven, I found this medicine born of necessity. Eleven years on, my body remembers what my mind struggles to forget.
Psychologists speak of children in barren lands who grow gardens inside themselves—each bloom a resilient adaptation, each root anchored in survival. Mechanisms that trade sorrow for transcendence, hushing cries like a mother’s palm against fever. Small architects of interior cathedrals where pain transforms to sacred hymns.
When I observe elders, skin mapped with time, I wonder what their inner children whispered through decades of impossible winters. Do they still hear those small voices, or have they silenced them beneath resignation? Have they lost the thread connecting them to that first self, forgetting we remain barefoot on understanding’s shoreline, collecting shells that both cut and astonish?
I have not forgotten. Each night, I thank the girl within who taught herself to tuck her trembling body into bed, to call the moon beautiful despite surrounding void, to transform quiet hours from fear to liberation. She knew before I did how to breathe between the teeth of terror, how to dance along the precipice of unbearable knowing.
She taught me rage that transmutes to reverence, burning clean as fever stars against winter darkness; to find wild birds in desolate skies, arrows pointing onward; how the body holds truth in marrow when mind folds memory into dusty corners; that liberation comes through wounds where light enters completely, where we break open like seed pods surrendering to soil. She knew the alchemy of turning bruises into ink, of writing survival across the blank pages of night.
In those rocking moments between consciousness and surrender, I am both mother and child, ocean and shore, wound and healing—and so are you.
Haven’t you felt it? That ancient rhythm in your bones when darkness pulls you under and your body remembers what your mind never learned to say? We carry these children within us, their small hands still holding the first stones we collected, eyes wide with forgotten wonder. They carry lanterns through our darkest forests, mapping constellations in our most desolate skies.
Listen—they speak to you now in hollow spaces between heartbeats, in your breath’s catch when beauty ambushes you, in unbidden tears. They know what we’ve tried to unlearn: that we are all unfinished stories, half-remembered lullabies, all bodies rocking ourselves back to wholeness.
They hold the truth we buried: that tenderness is not weakness but the ultimate courage. This is what saves us—not forgetting but remembering, not silencing but listening with our whole being, not growing up but growing down into our deepest roots. So rock with me now, and thank the children we were, for teaching us to cradle our shattered pieces like precious relics, for revealing the sacred within our most primal hungers, for saving the adult you’ve become today.
This poem was written by Rediet Giday, a 2024-25 Youth Poetry Fellow. Performed at the Seattle Arts & Lectures event with Hanif Abdurraqib at Town Hall Seattle on Wednesday, April 9, 2025.