May gossamer meadows be your pillow
And sing to you the weeping willow.
Lay down your head and close your eyes
And I will sing you lullabies.
Sleep take you where the angels billow.

Your dreams be light as thistledown
And woven stars bedeck your gown.
Lay down your head and close your eyes
And I will sing you lullabies;
And all my kisses be your crown.

Thistledown
by me, Patrick Gillespie, October 26 2025

Another of Duni’s songs, a lullaby for her adopted daughter, Odaii, from the fourth book of my Fantasy Epic, WistThistle, called The Tree of Life. I loosely based the song on the famous lullaby by Thomas Dekker, Golden Slumbers—famous because it was made into a song on the Beatles Abbey Road. Thomas Dekker, if you don’t know, was a contemporary playwright of Shakespeare’s. He wrote the Shoemaker’s Holiday, which remains one of the finest non-Shakespearean plays of the Elizabethan Era. Dekker was a gifted poet and dramatist, whose drama and poetry suggest a gentle, good-humored and observant personality. His imagery is notable for drawing on nature, and in that respect is closer to Shakespeare than any of Shakespeare’s peers, but debt plagued him and landed him in debtor’s prison for seven years. While capable of writing compelling drama, his surviving plays also bear marks of haste, lax character development and, in the words of later scholars, “moral slovenliness” (implying that he was too tolerant of his character’s faults from a dramatic standpoint).