Morning
Bernard Mann
Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse 2008 (view all the winners)
Third Prize
I woke slowly
with the dawn,
and the pale, rare light
of early morn
felt its way
across the floor
and clambered up
the curious wood
and danced on top
where night had stood.
A boy in my life's
own morning,
I woke to find
that night had ebbed
and I in a bed not my own,
in a room alone,
in a room on a farm
where the pale but luxuriant
golden light had come
and filled the room so full,
overflowing,
the clearest fluid,
an ambrosia,
and the room its flask,
and I, young genie, the metamorph,
inside this charm-ed chrysalis,
where the sun
touched wood
and danced on top
where night had stood.
A room so clean, so scrubbed,
so tended with
the diligence of
its farmwife maker,
the only statement sensed
was that of a silent unity
that bound together the walls and floor,
the simple sampler upon the door,
the sun, the air,
the clucking of the hens,
already bobbing to scrap for grain
upon the yard's husk-riddled earth,
while in my room
the sun caressed
the curious wood
and danced yet now
where night had stood.
The porcelain pitcher and old
wash basin crowned
the linen-dressed old wooden stand
next the window, where the hand of day
stitched yet farther across
the canvas of my awakening.
The robin's call,
fluting mellifluously
abreast the air,
reached out, too,
to the eaves
and the trees,
and the corncrib
and the well.
And then I knew
and I could tell
that all would dance
till twilight fell.
