PARKER, Colo. -- "It was a day like no other would be, I became a father to you, and you a son to me," reads Bob Johnson to his 4-year-old son Louis.

The book, "A Father's Poem to His Son" was written by Johnson on the eve of Father's Day in 2009.

"It just came out of nowhere, and it was very emotional doing it," Johnson said.

He awoke at 4 a.m. with an inspiration, he said, and in the four hours that followed, wrote a poem about fatherhood.

"He's sitting there with tears streaming down his eyes and I just wondered what he was doing," said Inger Johnson, his wife. "And after I read it, I couldn't finish because I was crying."

The poem continues: "The feeling I felt at your birth was the only one like it on my God's Earth. It touched my soul in a place virgin and wild; saved only for a man's just-born child."

"It's really a poem about the day he was born to the day I die, and he has to be completely on his own," said Johnson. "And all the things that happen in between."

Johnson wrote the poem so his son Louis would always know how much he loved him.

"When he was born, if you could bottle that feeling, you'd be the happiest person in the world," Johnson said.

But friends encouraged him to publish the work, so he asked his wife Inger to illustrate it.

"At first I thought 'Oh my goodness, what is he thinking?'" said Inger, chuckling.

Now their feelings for their son are preserved forever in print.

"I think it's going to mean so much to him to know that his father had felt those feelings," said Inger. "It's something that he can go back and read and just really feel that moment."

"There are things that even a 3-year-old can inspire, and he needs to know that can happen," said Johnson.

The Johnsons have now published a total of four books from the perspective of parents to both son and daughter. They have invested approximately $45,000 to create and publish the books, but they didn't feel right about profiting from something that came from the heart, they said, so all proceeds from sales are being donated to a children's charity in Haiti.

If you'd like more information, visit www.keepsake-books.com.