poetry

Early Morning

The howling
Ah-roo yip, yip (no growling)
Wakes me. Or does it? So near!
Hear?

And owling
hoo-HOO hoo-HOO (no growling)
Out my window, I hear life
Rife

With wildness
Foxes scream – WRAAAAGH! – no mildness
(Or growling) Look at the dark!
Hark!

It’s early
But day is alive, surly
Lonely, looking, using sound
Found

In darkness
Life not visible, starkness
Yet teeming, streaming. New day —
Yay!


This is my response to this week’s W3. POW Lesley Scoble challenged us to: Create a poetic scene, based on this imagery: It is early morning. You get out of bed and go to the window.

Here’s the thing, though — I go to work at 5 AM, so I get up at 3:30 AM. When I get out of bed and look out the window, I’m mostly looking at darkness. Or the moon. I have written a poem or two about the moon.

For this, though, my getting-out-of-bed moments of late are full of sounds, so I wrote about them.

The coyotes have been so active and loud. And the owls. Fortunately, I don’t heard the fox scream often, but I did the other morning, as I lay in bed thinking about getting up.

Morning — even early early morning when it is still dark — is my favorite time of day.

The poetic form is an unpronounceable Irish form: Deibide Baise Fri Toin. Quatrains. 3-7-7-1 syllables. Rhyme scheme aabb: lines 1 and 2 rhyme on two syllables, lines 3 and 4 rhyme on one.

15 thoughts on “Early Morning

  1. Sally this was so full of onomatopoeia that it seemed alive! I was going to read it aloud but I didn’t want to wake Mochi and cause her to bark,… Great job!!

  2. it is a privilege to be awakened by nature. Loved how your squeezed every sound you hear into this piece. And you’re right, I cannot pronounce that Irish form you used lol. Well done. 🙏

Leave a reply to Dawn Cancel reply