First Dawn Light (Penn Warren)
First Dawn Light, by Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)
By lines fainter gray than the faintest geometry
Of chalk, on a wall like a blackboard, day’s first light
Defines the window edges. Last dream, last owl-cry
Now past, now is the true emptiness of night,
For not yet first bird-stir, first bird-note, only
Your breath as you wonder what daylight will bring, and you try
To recall what the last dream was, and think how lonely
In sun-blaze you have seen the buzzard hang black in the sky.
For day has its loneliness too, you think even as
First bird-stir does come, first twitter, faithless and fearful
That new night, in the deep leaves, may lurk. So silence has
Returned. then, sudden, the glory, heart-full and ear-full,
For triggered now is the mysterious mechanism
Of the forest’s joy, by temperature or by beam,
And until a sludge-thumb smears the sunset’s prism,
You must wait to resume, in night’s black hood, the reality of dream.