The First Quiet of the Morning

“Don’t spend it on the stack of mail, the phone call,
the mounting inventory of groceries. Resist
the finished wash cycle and the dishes clamoring for clean-up.
Ignore the pileup by the front door, the mess left in the wake
of the weekend. These things carry the patience and constancy of bedrock.
Not the first quiet of the morning. It is thin and needy, hungry for your touch.
You will miss it when it goes, siphoning out the way it does, toppled
by the weight of all your noisy urgencies, those lists mortaring your day together.
This for you, this sweet and brief emptiness, this desert island, this nest nesting
your inevitable flight. Hold your wings still. Don’t go just yet.”

Maya Stein, 2013

I think I have told you before how much I adore Ninja poet, Maya Stein. Every Tuesday her ten line poems are delivered to my in-box and every Tuesday I find something within her words that says or does more than words should be capable of.

This weeks poem “The First Quiet of the Morning” does all that and more: and yet I do not know, or somehow cannot explain why it is that this particular poem in a symphony of many should be the one I wanted to share with you, I only hope that you will be so entranced you will  join Maya’s list and receive a weekly dose of medicinal, soul-warming words. For words matter don’t they? Poetry matters…

I hope too, you see, that these words reach you in the first quiet of the morning and that by words alone you are reminded of what is precious. Reminded to stand still and just be for a moment or two…