Daybreak

Prose Poems

Pelicans at Hrrison Chester Frost County Park. Photo by Ray Zimmerman. Not recent.

Daybreak

Had I sat outside through the moonless night, the sky would not have glimmered one moment sooner. But when I stepped onto the deck, the stars above Missionary Ridge began to fade. Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that, or so I have heard. Darkness was ending as a soft glow began, giving substance to metaphor. The Earth bowed to the Sun and received the light, first turning the sky a soft turquoise, then a delicate tea rose. It bathed the trees in golden luminance, and light had driven out the darkness. I wondered, can it drive out mine?

Statue of Liberty

As we drove to town, the torch appeared above the skyline. My dad called that old refinery “The Statue of Liberty,” but it smelled like kerosene. Young and old alike lived in its shadow and suffered lifetime respiratory problems. Hope of recovery was as dead as the abandoned stripmine behind the church. Today I live in a green forest adjacent to a National Park.

Home

I once drove past the house they sold to make a new urban future. The old house looked new with a fresh coat of paint, but I saw no sign of apple trees or gardens. The golden fields of hay and corn across the road had grown a fine crop of surveyors’ stakes.

Buddy

He parades around the neighborhood. A tiger in miniature, he arrives at my house looking for fish, though he is well nourished by food garnered at three apartments. A neighbor put out a heating pad for him to sleep on in cold weather. Buddy seems secure in our neighborhood, but a Great Horned Owl calls some nights, and coyotes patrol the land.

Sacrifice

We moderns often think ourselves superior to the ancients. We would never burn children to honor Moloch or otherwise sacrifice humans to propitiate the gods. In modern-day Amerika, economics is our god. Human sacrifice is accomplished through low wages, high prices, and limited medical benefits. We bomb fishing boats and expel those who speak or look differently, a sacrifice to the god of ethnic purity.

Margins

When spring comes, I will walk the guild trail and seek the wildflowers that bloom unexpectedly between the gravel trail and the woods. Like the margins of literature, extoled by deconstructionists, important things happen in the margins of roadways and paved trails. This strip of “empty” land is a landscape with no landscaper. It holds remnant patches of coneflower, sunflower, vetch, columbine, and milkweed. I see a lone milkweed and wonder if one is enough for a Monarch caterpillar. Though I have seen none here, the Eight-spotted Forester moth and the Red Admiral butterfly have appeared, all in a strip of vacant land.