The child's mind is a patchwork of the day's colors. As the parent begins to sing, the red thoughts fade first -- the argument at school dissolves into darkness. 'Hush now,' the parent whispers, and next the orange flickers of the evening TV go dark. In the third verse, the parent sings about the garden, and oddly the yellow dandelions the child picked that afternoon vanish from his mind, but the blue sky and the green grass stubbornly persist -- those were the happiest memories. It takes one more verse before the blue drains away, leaving only a few green embers of the grass where he played. By the last verse, even those fade, and the child sleeps in perfect darkness.