Prayers at Sunrise – a poem by Dorothy Cantwell

Prayers at Sunrise

The world is too beautiful
for someone like me,
who, after so many 
days in this world, still 
doesn’t know the name
of the bird that rouses me
each morning with
a loopy coil of sound or
what the morning means
in the trilling songs, 
that sound like joy,
which is maybe
the natural state
for wild things waking,
who greet the dawn 
with praise, and are not
cluttered with tangles 
of irrelevant fretting.
My ingratitude shames me
and I mourn all the sunrises
I have missed,
and will miss.
in this all too short life
I am blessed with.

Dorothy Cantwell has worked as an educator, actress, and playwright, Her work has been published in the Long Island Literary Journal, Brownstone Poets Anthology, Constellate Literary Journal, Flash Boulevard, Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters, River and South Review, Poetrybay, and Angel City Review, among other print and online journals. She has been featured at various venues in NYC where she lives and works. She studies poetry with Sister Fran McManus in the St Francis of Assisi Poetry Workshop.