Morning Moments

Light tinkers, crawls over lichen-painted oak and dangling moss. Up and higher it climbs, striding over darkness with a big transparent foot.  Dawn’s white cuff forms around the softening moon changing night to broken shadows. Like a ladder, imprints of glowing squares topple over the treetop, the leaf top. Dew is a smoke screen under the first strands of sun’s warmth, under bird’s first song nudging the earth awake. In those few, quiet, listening moments all things halt at sun’s display. That is, before the day quickens, before light is used as a great armored hammer crashing down on our schedules, we who rise in its wake.  A tick tick ticking keeps us all in time.

Below my blankets, below my waking mind, below below the alarm clock, still the thick fog waters a bed of green, in secrets of a dream. Oh, come now, limbs and morning breeze. Lift me up again; rolling the grey dust back against the burgundy rocks I once bathed under. When there was a time like primitive living. When living was for a beautiful moment, and ancient memory and future hope seeped into the present.  As if where we go, where we have been, could leave us. But, hanging on, hanging on until my eyes are open.

Chirping, cooing, crowing, to the sound of automobiles goring my ears. The day begins. Soon, sunrise will be tall in the sky, mustering into an incubating heat as if daylight blesses million foot armies marching, stomping on the grass, the pavement, sentiments; hence, without a day, lest we pause the bustling under those cycling waking hours, and yank the surface down so we can stand upon the waters. Breathing in morning moments of the last time we rise until the last leaf falls, call like the birds do, waking, waking.  Awake.

Morning Moments was published in Zaum, Volume Nineteen. Sonoma State University Literary Magazine, 2014.