Sarah Donkin
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.