The sun and I awoke,
squinting at first, into:
a horizontal morning world;
a lazy, layer-cake morning world
marbled with dark and light;
a stretching, long-shadowed, yawning morning world;
a goose-bump world
of cold sunlight and colder shadows.A mutual morning conspiracy:
shadows, creek, sleeping bag and I
defied Earth's ancient siren call;
refused (with the sun's complicity)
to point, like compass needles, toward the north;
remained instead aligned,
polarized in our east-west morning world.It seemed quite fitting
that the feathered exclamation mark
that opened my eyes wide
(a Great Blue Heron, majestic morning bird
skimming through layers of shadow and light).
That the Great Blue Heron,
gliding above the creek,
should come along and split
the morning world,
from east to west,
along its shadowed grain.
by Roy J. Beckemeyer
Grouse Creek,
Cowley County, Kansas, 1975
This Web Page Last Updated 12 October 2001
