Dawn

Dawn only begins to think about showing its face after the moon surfaces, even with a night of clouds about to weep because the light is still so far off, and the morning star is dawn’s mother, and daybreak is dawn’s father, although dawn was not meant to be a mere child. 

We were being very coy, the roosters were about to chase the hens, and we were no better, our beloved awaiting our touch, which we always wanted to make anew, but time was the destroyer. Also, we knew what the others wanted us to worship. We lived, dying came next.

The rapture is nothing new. Alone with one another, we pick up where we left off, the rain begins falling and we lie on the bed naked and too alive for the good of our aging bodies, but the rain will melt the snow now that spring is beginning to show its rowdy face, summer its drowsy body, autumn the first signs of the winter returning and nothing but the ice that no longer competes with fire in Frost’s warning, yes, a warning more than what people like to call poems because poems never sink as deep as California mud that slides your house into the canyon for starters, though maybe it was a poem since wildfires returned with the drought. Time is always short. For droughts will increase. And flames burn only the future.

(12 March 2014) 

copyright 2014 by Floyce Alexander