-

Dawn Revisited

By Rita Dove



Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don’t look back,
the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits –
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You’ll never know
who’s down there, frying those eggs,
if you don’t get up and see.

There's nothing like the sun crystallizing off the snow piles on each side of our driveway necessitating sunglasses, don't you know, to get a girl up and moving. The exile to the grey and frozen tundra of another CinCity winter is soon at an end. My money's down on seeing someone in shorts today. Outside. A six-pack of Ale 8 on the line.
I've taken a break from this blog for a while. Long story and plenty of time to tell it, but believe it's a good time to return. The world still needs poetry. Or mockery. Lucky me has both.

Comments

  1. Linda StarrMarch 6, 2015 at 9:36 AM

    welcome back, love the bird painting and the poem, beautiful

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownMarch 6, 2015 at 9:46 AM

    Thanks! It's a day to believe Spring really might just be around the corner.

    ReplyDelete
  3. English RiderMarch 6, 2015 at 8:25 PM

    good to have you back

    ReplyDelete
  4. The BugMarch 7, 2015 at 9:50 AM

    I was just looking at your blog name on my blog roll the other day & wondering how you were doing! Welcome back!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Hey, thanks for your thoughts and your time:>)

Popular posts from this blog

A Year with EB White

-
Image
"You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that."----- from Charlotte's Web I am a soul always drawn and fascinated by the idea of " A Year of...". A Year of Rumi. A Year of Calvin and Hobbes. A year cooking with Julia Child. A project that provides guidance for the year and a ruler we can measure inward growth in the course of our circle around the sun. One year, after an early marriage and an unsurprising--except to me--early divorce, I came across a book by Sue Hubbell titled A Country Year. I didn't plan for it to take a year to read, but it did. I only read it at night before I went t
Read more

The Poet Goes to Indiana by Mary Oliver

-
Image
I'll tell you a half-dozen things that happened to me in Indiana when I went that far west to teach. You tell me if it was worth it. I lived in the country with my dog— part of the bargain of coming. And there was a pond with fish from, I think, China. I felt them sometimes against my feet. Also, they crept out of the pond, along its edges, to eat the grass. I'm not lying. And I saw coyotes, two of them, at dawn, running over the seemingly unenclosed fields. And once a deer, but a buck, thick-necked, leaped into the road just-oh, I mean just, in front of my car— and we both made it home safe. And once the blacksmith came to care for the four horses, or the three horses that belonged to the owner of the house, and I bargained with him, if I could catch the fourth, he, too, would have hooves trimmed for the Indiana winter, and apples did it, and a rope over the neck did it, so I won something wonderful; and there was, one morning, an owl flying, oh pale angel, into the hay loft o
Read more

Goldfinches by Mary Oliver

-
Image
Some goldfinches were having a melodious argument at the edge of a puddle. The birds wanted to bathe, or perhaps just to dip their heads and look at themselves, and they were having trouble with who should be first, and so on. So they discussed it while I stood in the distance, listening. Perhaps in Tibet, in the old holy places, they also have such fragile bells. Or are these birds really just that, bells come to us--come to this road in America--let us bow our heads and remember now how we used to do it, say a prayer. Meanwhile the birds bathe and splash and have a good time. Then they fly off, their dark wings opening from their bright, yellow bodies; their tiny feet, all washed, clasping the air.
Read more