A terrible joy, Dave Mehler
Last Light, First Light
Morning calls us moments
before the sun wakes our silence
broken beautifully by ducks and geese
announcing with efficient excess
what our digital alarm will later predict.
Their cries and honks echo beneath
the bridge where they shelter sometimes,
unless the tide catches them unaware.
They are part of the sound collage
we hear nightly through our open windows.
Our Inner Harbor of sirens and drunks,
Currents of wind and water, ambient light
all battling sleep’s insistence.
______________________
Richard Weaver
Review by Joann Renee Boswell
The spacing in this first line puts the reader precisely in the right place for this poem. The extra space around “moments” gives us time to pause, and then we can fill that space with the rest of the images in this short, but full poem. In these lines I am both lulled into sleep with the white noise of this “sound collage,” while also pulled awake thinking of the audio landscape that calls each morning–helping me to “battl[e] sleep’s insistence.”