Sound carries further in the dark
which is maybe why the night,
come early morning,
can seem weary of itself.
Often, we hear highway now.
My son thinks it’s the trees,
gleaned from the hillside,
to make way for new houses,
mixed use developments.
Somewhere, close enough, a machine,
bigger than it should be,
reverberates the throb
of progress & development—
maybe it’s the trees marching,
finally, and against us. Maybe the earth
shrugging. Kids these days
know screen-lit faces,
parents know color coded ratings
of risk: air, flood, fire, terror
or some new virus
come, or coming to raze us—
Mothers must be vigilant,
as most tales go, epiphany
requires our absence.
Even so,
I blind grope toward light,
the shift in shadow—
the light switch as it lifts—
his lengthening body,
still sleeping sound,
my own ordinary promise
of morning.
This poem first appeared in Each Bearing Out (Kelsay Books, 2022).
—
Rebecca Brock is the author of The Way Land Breaks (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023). In 2022, she won the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest at The Comstock Review and the Kelsay Book’s Woman’s Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA from Bennington College. She has been a flight attendant for most of her adult life and is still surprised by this fact. You can find more of her work at www.rebeccabrock.org.
