Dawn Clatters In

Like Marley dragging his chains.

It’s still dark in the winter mornings when I wake my 10 year old son for chores on the farm. He’s getting better, but some mornings he acts the way most Marines feel when they get kicked in the ribs at 2 in the morning by the off-going sentry and hear, “you have firewatch b**ch.”

If you know, you know. If you don’t, “firewatch” is sentry duty, usually a couple hours, and usually when you’re already droning from sleep deprivation.

Once he has successfully emerged from the warmth of his bed and stumbled out to feed the pigs his usual cheery demeanor asserts itself. But it takes a bit to come to terms with a world that’s still dark, and usually also cold and wet.

I’m not proud of this, but for something like a decade in the Marine Corps the first thought through my head and word on my lips in the morning was pretty much an expletive. Those are the kinds of days where you wake up sharply, probably physically sore, beat up, cold and wet (or soon to be), and sleep deprived. You will be uncomfortable due to exposure for the rest of the time you’re awake that day and will probably spend most of that time doing something physically or psychological painful or stupid. If I sound down on it, I’m not. There’s a reason my son is up doing chores before dawn.

Mornings contain the first negotiation with ourselves we will have each day. I have written in a poem published elsewhere of the way that waking up can feel like sustaining an injury.¹ This poem reflects on morning and walking into that first negotiation of the day.

           Dawn Clatters In

For dawn clatters in
              dragging light through the air
like Marley his chains
              and boxes of coin.

But I will arise
              before it arrives
and arm myself 
              against the day.

In every beginning  
              is the scrapyard of
past. And in parenthesis
              have my dreams passed.

1. See “Caliban in Snow,” in Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. Vol. 23, No. 2, Fall 2015.