Rising To The Day

When a spoonful of soft morning light
seeps through the slatted blinds,
the first half-awake movement
is a groggy shift to my right side toward a
small brown clock on the bedside table.

Glowing red numbers watched all night
from the clock face, vigilant as they
flowed through minutes and hours,
recurring red strokes of light portraying
time's passing, clever luminous figures
contorting their electric bodies.

Sunlight begins to drip from the partially
open blinds onto smooth ceramic tiles.
Morning appears as slender white lines
on the cool floor.  A strange sense of
obligation, perhaps debt, floats
in my cloudy, waking brain.  Debt.
My first emotional encounter of this new
day with a bedside clock.

Sitting on the edge of the still warm bed,
feet dangling into the day, I begin the
Ritual of Rising, the canticle of my daily
wondering.  How shall I spend myself in this day?
Where will revealing light penetrate darkness?
On whom will rain fall as a cleansing shower
or as painful tears let loose by an angry sky?
What difference will it make that I rise into
this particular morning?

No answer comes to fill the soundless
moment or to satisfy imagination's curiosity.
Verses of the morning hymn rise in hope, then languish
in a vacuum of silence.  A mute world waits for
wisdom's clarity.

Today, pulled between the solid floor and
the soft pillow, as I watched Morning's paintbrush
create fanciful designs on the wall, I heard
a thought, faint at first, singing its way to
the center of my consciousness.  On the wings
of sweet melody came hopeful words.
   "Rise and Discover."