IN THE GREAT GREEN ROOM
by DANIEL LIPARA, TRANS. BY ROBIN MYERS
I don’t know when I read it for the first time. There was no sound before.
Robin had ears in her belly. She’d bought the book on Amazon so she could read it to a part of herself that was no longer her. And when sound came as if through a tunnel, we started speaking to the part of Robin that became our child.
Now I remember.
It was nighttime. I placed my hand on the tunnel of her navel. We scraped our voices against the poem’s one hundred thirty-one words, and then we said the things people say when they don’t know what to say.
This happened often. Our child, five months old as I write this, reacts to the sound of the poem. He gazes into some internal space, listens with his eyes looking inward. I’m the other side of that outside. Goodnight Moon is a sparkler I light when I lose the words in the distance between us. I return to the one hundred thirty-one words like a form of speech.
I’d never read a poem so many times. Repeating it means witnessing how everything else transforms. Between one repetition and the next, I read online, cartilage hardened in Robin’s uterus and a second heart began to pump twenty-three liters of blood. Between one repetition and the next, the part that was our child felt drawn to light and heat, like an insect, and touched his hand with his hand.
What doesn’t change is the poem.
I know the words by heart, but my memory stumbles. For some reason, this keeps happening. The poem names what’s there, then names it again as a way of saying till tomorrow. The great green room, the telephone, the painting of the bears in their chairs. Reading it means confirming that everything’s still there, right where it’s supposed to be.
I’m not so sure.
When my son was born, he and I were ushered off while Robin’s C-section got stitched up and our child cried his shrieky cry and I wanted to tell him that he wasn’t alone, his mother was fine and waiting for him right next door, these were routine inoculations, this was the other side of life we’d told him about so often, listing all the things that made it worthwhile to be here. But all I could think to do was repeat his name and take his hand and start reciting a children’s book while the doctors pricked his legs and squeezed droplets into his eyes.
There’s a rabbit.
He’s in his green room and it’s nighttime.
I’m writing at night, too. My child is asleep on my lap and I’ve just read him the poem I’m trying to write about, the one he heard when sound came. I read it to give him the calm of eyes looking inward. This happened, it’s going to keep happening.
On the night sound came to our son, we read to him with our hands on Robin’s belly and our voices aimed at her navel, confusing the body we were speaking to. Like the night he kicked when we started to read. Like the night that thrashed like a little animal in a net when we reached the end.
Goodnight Moon is a book about a little animal getting ready for bed. It was published in 1947 and its author, Margaret Wise Brown, demolishes every prejudice against the literary genre that, she’s said to have said, is the most open to experimental writing. It’s been the bestselling book in this genre for seventy-five years.
The most-sold children’s story of all time has no story. There’s a rabbit in pajamas saying goodnight. Not to everything, though. Nor is it entirely clear that the rabbit is speaking.
I don’t know who speaks.
I don’t know who speaks in the poem I read almost every night. I look things up on the phone I use to write this.
I find people sputtering with rage in Amazon reviews and Reddit forums. To many readers, Goodnight Moon tells the story of an abandoned rabbit. The bears in the painting, someone says, look like they’ve smoked methamphetamines. The lady rabbit is a specter, motionless as a hologram. Nothing can explain the telephone or why there are two clocks. The rabbit is so frightened that he passes out. Unless he dies, someone says.
It’s true.
I mean, it’s strange. I don’t know who speaks. The lady rabbit appears and disappears in the same position, like a tired light bulb. And the little house is suddenly lit from inside. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel about the blank page between the brush and the bowl of mush. I don’t know what to do when the poem, the rabbit, the lady rabbit, or God knows who else says goodnight to nobody.
This poem says goodnight to nobody.
These days, I teach workshops on poetry and form. That’s my job. My underlying conviction is that wherever the atmosphere of a poem feels odd, there’s something else—something concrete —making it tick. It can be small, simple, even repetitive. These days, I think a lot about repetition. With a child asleep in my lap. I can’t sleep.
It’s not that I’m ashamed to be thinking so much about a book intended for readers between the ages of zero and three years old. Or maybe I am, just a little, but who cares. The final rhyme keeps me up at night. The calm of the blue through the window. The clocks’ progress. The mouse gazing out at the moon, unafraid of the cats. The electric shock of the blank page, filled with nobody.
Nobody.
Who’s been there the whole time. As I spoke to a child—to his presence in the room of another body—who existed, even though I couldn’t see him. He was more like the negative of an absence.
I learned the absent presence of my son by turning to that blank page.
It got even more inexplicable. That’s what happens with many of the poems I like. They’re so alive that they tingle. It feels like things are moving around.
So I look at where they are.
Goodnight Moon is a two-round poem. The first lists things in the room; the second bids them goodnight. It comes and goes between the wide angle shot, in color, and the black and white close-up of those things. Then the rabbit in pajamas falls asleep. That’s where the book ends. Without repeating the order or the things.
I know it’s absurd to read this book meticulously: that’s why it took me so long. But so many things once seemed absurd in their scale and now feel crucial, decisive, colossal: a dog barking at naptime, the texture of paving stones, the crack of an ankle. I can no longer look in the way I used to, on the scale of life before. Now, then, as I learn a new kind of humility in the presence of what I never thought would be so important, I transcribe:
ROOM ROOM
TELEPHONE MOON
RED BALLOON COW JUMPING
PICTURE OF A COW JUMPING LIGHT
BEARS RED BALLOON
CHAIRS BEARS
KITTENS CHAIRS
MITTENS KITTENS
TOYHOUSE MITTENS
MOUSE CLOCKS
COMB SOCKS
BRUSH LITTLE HOUSE
BOWL FULL OF MUSH MOUSE
OLD LADY COMB
BRUSH
NOBODY
MUSH
OLD LADY
STARS
AIR
NOISES EVERYWHERE
The distance between the first list and the second is the space opened by the poem. There, where I wait for something to repeat itself, something else appears.
Nobody.
The space that opens is a ghostly one. If the blank page feels both strange and part of the whole, as it does to me, it’s because the poem’s voice made room for it to appear. Then it says goodnight to the moon without naming it. And to the light it never mentioned. And to the clocks it ignored. Same with the socks. This is what the poem does.
It bids farewell to what it didn’t name.
Nobody is the crystallization of a technique. Whenever the poem parts from something it hadn’t mentioned before, it’s saying wait, there’s more. Naming it means making it appear. Goodnight Moon starts to resemble a poem about invocation. Powerful enough to create the illusion of predictability and to manifest the unexpected. Even when it does repeat something – the old lady rabbit, the little house – it does so in a different way.
The two rounds are a mirage of symmetry and order. The poem does whatever it wants.
It’s three in the morning. The poem is doing whatever it wants. I think about the sharpness of the moment when nobody emerges: poking its way into a repetition (the comb, the brush, the bowl full of mush), prodding into a couplet (brush, mush) like a glitch in the rhyme, a startling apparition right where you expected the comfortable, predictable calm of the couplet that the poem itself taught you to expect. The distance is the ghostly space the poem opens up.
Goodnight Moon is a book of unrepeatedrepetitions. Its order disorders. Right where I expect it to repeat itself, I just wrote, something else appears. Or the other way around: if things appear, it’s because the poem chose the path of repetition.
Its order opens the door to the unexpected.
It breaks by making you feel like something new can crop up. And it does.
It’s out of control.
I’m writing this from inside the way I live now: the everyday exercise of embracing the unexpected, realizing that my son himself is what expands and makes everything more volatile. And that when faced with my peaceable, predictable fantasy of what life with a child was supposed to be like, the child is what does something else.
Then there’s what a pediatrician said when Robin and I, more desperate than we ever imagined, begged for solutions, anything that might teach our child to sleep.
Chaos, he explained, is necessary.
That’s where the child is.
It’s through the cracks in my own ideal that Mica – his name: a stone in the river – appears as the person he is, not my projection of him.
Every day is a struggle against the wish for things to be calmer and more foreseeable. The harder I cling to the illusion of order—to schedules and routines, the clearing of household clutter, and especially sleep—the more I cling to the idea that if things were a certain way yesterday, then today should repeat them. But the more I think there’s supposed to be a reason for everything, the harder it is to connect with what’s alive.
Sequentiality doesn’t exist. Nothing is linear. I have no control. The rigid insistence on predictability has become an adversary. Accepting surprise as the only constant is an elusive art.
But it’s in what I least expected—what I didn’t see coming—that the most vivid, the most beautiful, the wildest and strangest things appear. That’s where the joy is.
Goodnight Moon is not a poem about what’s there, but what you didn’t see coming. Order and repetition—two forms of control—are the cloth that tears so that the unsettling, uncomfortable vertigo of wonder can come rushing in. The poem shows you something it hadn’t named. Then it names something you can’t see.
Here is its joy: in making of repetition a path into the unknown, in making of the blank page a way to capture what is, in fact, there—a fleeting, sidelong glimpse of nobody.
A poem, apparently, can do such things. In this one, saying till tomorrow is enough to make it the site of an invocation. Goodbye suffices to capture, almost by accident, the absent presence that only the poem can see. Robin had ears in her belly.
Now I remember.
It’s not just my prayer of inward eyes. Goodnight Moon gave me a way to greet what was here, even though I couldn’t see it. The part of Robin’s body that ceased to be her: the nothing that’s there. Not the hazypresence of someone who’s gone, but of someone on their way.
It’s still a greeting, a way to tell my child that I’m here, with him. To learn that the only constant is surprise. And that the only unalterably repeatable thing is the one I didn’t see coming.
Joy, uncomfortable and wild.
It’s a joy that has brought me, unable to control the unknown, exactly what I never imagined. The great green room, the blank page, the child waking in my lap.
author pic here
Poet and translator Daniel Lipara is the author of Otra vida—translated into English as Another Life by Robin Myers (Eulalia Books) – and Como la noche adentro de los ojos, published in Argentina and Chile. His translations from English to Spanish include works by John Burnside, Victoria Chang, and Bhanu Kapil, among others. Like the Night Inside the Eyes, the English translation of his second book, will be published by Thirdhand Books in 2027.
Robin Myers is a poet and translator. She won the 2025 National Book Award in Translated Literature for We Are Green and Trembling, by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (New Directions), also longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Award. Other recent translations include works by Andrés Neuman, Cristina Rivera Garza, Eliana Hernández-Pachón, Simón López Trujillo, Dolores Dorantes, and many other contemporary Latin American writers. Her poetry collection Centro is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.
Next ( Dimitra Kotoula, trans. by Maria Nazos) >
< Previous ( Roxana Crisólogo, trans. by Kim Jensen and José Luis Rico)