Its motive from the fact you cannot listen.
We who should have known how to instruct
With rhymes for your waking, rhymes for your sleep
Names for the animals you took to bed,
Tales to distract, legends to protect,
Later an idiom for you to keep
And living, learn, must learn from you, dead.
To make our broken images rebuild
Themselves around your limbs, your broken
Image, find for your sake whose life our idle
Talk has cost, a new language. Child
Of our time, our times have robbed your cradle.
Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.
This is the poet’s final wish, her yearning that the child — or future children — will sleep peacefully in a new world engendered by the “final sleep” of the baby that was killed; the death, that, ironically, “has woken” a new society; a peaceful world. 
 The last line is suitably rhythmic, like the opening stanza. In a complex manipulation of contradictions, the poet says that the peaceful, living “sleep” of new life can only be “woken” by the “final sleep” that was the child’s death.  This line reflects the complexity of the terrible events of the Troubles.
Child of Our Time