Days of Dawn

Days of Dawn

The lonely poet who sought with words to
sift truth through images waits for the ice like dust
to dissolve as the days plays on.

Some days, like Hugo described, are dawn from
beginning to end. Others, though, long past noon,
begin with the setting sun and end just the same.

He used to write profusely with pen, never scratching out a word,
never editing his thoughts for fear of discovery. He wrote to
be discovered;
he wrote to mine hopeful treasures and hold them to the light.

He wrote with broken emotion, he wrote of the night light
reflecting the silky hair of his brunette first love. He wrote
of death, “an ode to Jimi and Janis”, before he had lost even
a relative or close friend. He thought he knew, or could uncover,
what the rivers meant that ran just below the surface of reflection.

He composed unrhymed verse and rhythmic prose, twenty or so
stapled and offered to aunts and uncles Christmas and birthdays. His
critics never breathed.

And then he was silent for two decades or more, busy, it seemed,
with speaking the lines others suggested would pay better than poetry.
He liked Berkeley, college and town, but spent his life on prairies and
rivers learning rural winds. Buildings and pavement were the wind-rows
of his youth and air like asphalt.

He took the pen again midlife, excuse the metaphor; for he clicked the
letters processed into words, leaving the pen behind. Lines were neater,
and words more legible this time.

He writes alone, and wishes his topics were more bouquets and wine;
but this is his cheap therapy, the unedited motions of hurts over time.
He writes alone, and yet is loved more than he knows…and he knows
he is loved; but that river still flows under the sound of words he
was taught were proper. He still wants to discover

Who the writer is within, and why the river is so quiet this time of life.