Descant Before Dawn

I remember

twirling around the kitchen with a glass of water in my hand,

like the earth spinning and shaking the sea out of it’s great, mysterious depths,

early, before the sun rose to see me,

with my messy hair and my ears full of music,

and knowing that this must be

what it is to be happy

because the world is full of

the smell of dried hay in the summer and

the taste of wild blackberries

hiding between tiny thorns and

the breathlessness of the mountaintops and

the embrace of the hills rolling down into valleys and

light glimmering off of the rising and falling ocean and

ancient, towering forests breathing silently and

the sounds of frogs singing love songs to each other at night but

even while the world was still quiet and dark,

with fluorescent lights overhead and the refrigerator humming in the background,

and with a glass of water nearly spilling out onto the kitchen floor,

all I wanted to do was twirl.