'Coalport Morning' by Marilyn Gunn

Dawn trees
with their long low companionable shadows
they would not be parted from;

it is as if they carry on the breath:
those new earth mornings of candescent light,
spreading their beams across millennia
to reach this place.

Nothing has changed,
nothing escapes the soft flood,
the bright benediction of slant rays
firing up dew, kindling grass
on this next in the chain of first days:

light the frail touch paper
every leaf burns.

Remember that morning
when bird-song dazzled us awake?
And how we lay there then listening
in the hush of the great afterwards silence
that expanded around us;

And then the green, whispering,
calling us,
drawing us out.