We trust dawn, though sun’s Light is a light with
No precedent, never proved ahead of its Coming—
Waited for by the law that Hope has made it …²
The Doomed—regard the sunrise with a different Delight—
Because when it next burns abroad, they doubt to Witness it.³
Dawn Snuffs out star’s spent wick—⁴
Morning: when we are Awake
And there is Dawn in us.⁵
Each night we Burn the records of the day
At sunrise each soul is Born again:⁶
Every day dawn finds herself Naked—
And wonders if she’s Lost herself entirely in
The night: her clothes, precepts, Selfhood—⁷
Let them sleep, let them sleep on,
Till stormy night be Gone,
And the eternal morrow Dawn—
Then the curtains will be Drawn,
And they wake into a Light—
Whose day shall never die in night—⁸
The first morning of Creation writes what
The last dawn of Reckoning shall read:⁹
Here it is dawn Eternally:
Hour of Revolutionary Prophesy.¹⁰
¹ Marina Tsvetaeva tr. Mary Maddock, Akhmatova
² Wendell Berry, The Design of a House
³ Emily Dickinson, The Doomed
⁴ Sylvia Plath, Epitaph for Fire and Flower
⁵ Henry David Thoreau, Walden
⁶ Walter Malone, Opportunity
⁷ Aja Couchois Duncan, Fictive
⁸ Richard Crashaw, An Epitaph upon Husband and Wife
⁹ Omar Khayyám tr. Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát
¹⁰ John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos