Too early up, too bleary
to read my watch.
Light here breaks
before I’m queued to it,
pale gray by five a.m.
We’re closer
to everlasting summer days
that fade
but hardly blacken.
Plants work to exhaustion,
spreading their Persian carpets
even over sand
at Saint Simon’s Inlet.
The relentless noise
of manufacture: cells dashing
through leaf veins,
leaves breaking from branches,
caterpillars chewing vegetation,
the aural footfalls
of a million insects
traversing a tree.
The moan and pop

of trees like old men
bending in the wind—
all this is mystery,
the wandering of a mind
pulled from sleep.
Listening at that level,
how could I survive the din?
Sharon Scholl is a retired college professor of humanities and non-western studies. A musician/composer, she maintains a website that gives free music. Her chapbook, Summer’s Child, is new from Finishing Line Press. Individual poems are current in Peacock Journal and Heyday Magazine.