A Slow Start to the Morning

It is early in the morning
and you take your coffee on the front porch,
waiting for the first light
to make itself known.

You are slow. Mornings are worse,
but you know the prescription.
A bit of coffee. A bit of light.
A few words on paper.

Maybe a few more.
You wonder sometimes
why it is you need so much time
to ponder your way through your world

when most of that same world
lives on a hair trigger of opinions,
anger and judgement. You wonder
at how much a stranger you feel

no matter how much you engage.

No matter. This is who you are.
Fast to think. Slow to feel.
Trusting little without the time
to see what is sustainable and what is a lie.

In the distance, you hear geese honking
as they fly South. Early this year,
they fly and bleat. They know something you do not.
Their instinct are true and they trust them.

Yours too are true, but sometime many years ago,
you lost your confidence in those truths.
And so…
the slowness.

It has not hindered you. The slowness. You might think it would,
in a world that moves ever faster. But it has not.
And so you spend this time, sipping your coffee,
waiting for the light, waiting for the demons to clock out

Breathing in the air, the love of God.
The world awaits.
And it can.

About this poem.

I often write of my slowness in processing emotions. Or my depression (pretty well controlled, Halleluia!) Or simply a poem about first light. Poetry is never about one thing.

The photograph was taken from my front porch.

Tom