Even grumpy November clouds
can’t keep out the optimistic dawn
It glides in, muted and crisp, through
black-lace silhouettes of sleeping trees
Watercolor stripes, brushed ever so slowly
by an ethereal artist, alight patterns of pastel 

My gloved fingers wrap tighter 
around my steaming cup of coffee
It is my tether to every other morning
before and after this moment
Across rooftops, crows taunt each other
a tease, a laugh, or good-natured heckling, perhaps 

The bickering of my own squawking children is
muffled behind curtains and doors
I can almost imagine that the disputes
inside belong to some other family
Some other tired, bedraggled mom will be
parceling out Cheerios and sopping up milk.

When I was younger,
not so young that I woke to cereal and cartoons
but not old enough yet to afford my freedom,
I would find my dad each morning silently studying 
the birds and trees behind our house, 
hand wrapped around coffee, head tilted slightly
as if the chattering and chirping brought by the breeze
was a language familiar to the stillness of his soul.
Each morning, when the soft pad of my 
slippered feet shuffled down the hall
he would turn towards me and smile.

©Vixen Lea 2020
(Featured image by pasja1000 from Pixabay )

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Poem originally published on https://medium.com/being-known