THE PALE DAWN OF THE DAY

These gray mornings to which we awake

half-asleep from the activity of the night,

with a dirty mug of coffee on our side,

even the feeble pale iron light hurting our eyes

- these gray morning resurrections

to all the griefs of the day, the fears

that gnaw the heart in light but sleep at night;

those faraway and lost, they come back

in the scent of their clothes left behind,

those closer and unattainable in their graves

come back as memories cutting deep in the brain.

This is why the day is harder than the night,

not for the skeletal trees rising from the mud

and dead grass under the weight of

the unbroken ashen clouds; those

are just inconveniences for the soul,

like the cat scratching the door or the bill

that should have been paid week ago, or

the pile of dishes growing in the sink.

No, the iron day has a more terrible hold

than the mere pieces of the puzzle its broken into;

the day reveals to the eyes in their sockets

and the unwilling eyes of the mind what

both are loath to see, the life we lead

in its horrible pettiness and soul-cutting tragedy,

the rdiculous comedy of our mistakes and the deep

hurt we have carved across now shattered lives,

the dead and the dying, those wounded to the

core of their being, all the great evils

and the little things that infect the wounds

we struck in others' flesh and carry in ours,

the wreckage we have left that no one

can forgive. The pale dawn of the day

shows to us ourselves in

all our pathetic cruelty, the flotsam

on the shore of the gray light from the dreams

we sank, when the night in its mercy

gave us darkness in which to hide,

like the loving mother we once betrayed.

14.04.2020