You can keep afternoon and its dwindling mysteries, <br />twilight with its seedy hauteur. You can have night <br />with its phony neon and rented motel rooms. <br />I prefer morning when the air is so quiet the rub <br />of a cricket's leg sounds like wildness beckoning. <br /> <br />My feet pad along the carpet like bears' paws <br />along a stretch of furred moss. The cherry tree <br />catches the first glint of gold in its deep green. <br />The kitchen is mine, empty and humming. <br />I am queen of the breakfast room, empress <br />of a new regime. Ideas sprout from my head <br /> <br />like bursts of startled blue jays. All possibilities <br />lie before me in the rustle of leaves at the window. <br />Something extraordinary is about to happen— <br />I could write an essay on forgiveness, <br />or construct an altar to Artemis with five red <br />maple leaves, a fish bone and a snake's rattle. <br /> <br />I have imagined dawn lifting her skirt, the limousine <br />of night pausing to release debutantes in important <br />gowns. I have watched schools of light <br />emerge from a window's shoreline and know that <br />beginning is always beginning, every midnight open <br />to a river of mornings, the day a fresh tributary. <br /> <br />Anything is possible: understanding quantum physics, <br />making plans for an innocent city. Pain could disappear <br />by sundown. Night could wear a sunlit dress. <br />We could start a journey to the new Jerusalem, <br />waving good-bye at the station where the trains pass <br />and dawn, blank as a newborn, floods each window.<br /><br />Geraldine Connolly<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/in-praise-of-dawn/
