Rising – a poem by Michael Scottoline

Rising


A mood as much as a time of morning, 
the amniotic hour before first light 
is more languid than tranquil, like the dark
blue sea all that ever breathed was born from.  

Cowboy coffee simmers in the saucepan. 
The frost-tinged window mirrors back my face
beside a moth that might be dead, and the stars 
that might have died already, so I'm told.

The wind-stirred birches whir with l'heure bleu bird song.  
Never refusing the music they're given,  
they shed their skin until their lives are choirs 
of praise for light that voids the void it leaps from.  

The hour of my death is any hour  
I dare to be reborn, to be suborned 
and let the sleeper drown, the dreamer wake,    
and walk above the waters of what I sense—  

to scry the life that's mirrored in the sky  
as it appears, a fading lone frontier
for minor glories like the morning star,
that bright moth awaiting a greater flame. 

Michael Scottoline lives in Bucharest, Romania.