Dawn Snuffs out Star’s Spent Wick²
Each Night I Burn the records of the
Day at Sunrise each soul is Born again³
Every day Dawn finds herself Naked –
And wonders if she’s Lost herself entirely
In the night: her Clothes, Precepts, Selfhood⁴
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 Night⁵
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 it⁶
The first Morning of Creation Writes what
The Last Dawn of Reckoning shall Read⁷
The Doomed – regard the Sunrise with a
Different Delight – because when it next
Burns abroad, they Doubt to Witness it⁸
Here it is Dawn Eternally: Hour
Of Revolutionary Prophesy⁹
Morning: when I’m Awake
And there is Dawn in Me¹⁰
¹ Marina Tsvetaeva tr. Mary Maddock, Akhmatova
² Sylvia Plath, Epitaph for Fire and Flower
³ Walter Malone, Opportunity
⁴ Aja Couchois Duncan, Fictive
⁵ Richard Crashaw, An Epitaph upon Husband and Wife
⁶ Wendell Berry, The Design of a House
⁷ Omar Khayyám tr. Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát
⁸ Emily Dickinson, The Doomed – Regard the Sunrise
⁹ John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
¹⁰ Henry David Thoreau, Walden