John Alter lives and writes in Port Republic, Maryland.

A New Day
By John Alter

A new day is not unlike
starting a new poem in a
form you are only now discovering
although you have long perhaps imagined
yourself writing in this style with
this tone. You imagine that the
small birds and the dogwood tree
enjoy the gentle breeze. You are
glad to share the day also
with a few friends. An hour
passes, the agenda of today begins
to demand attention, alarms go off.
You think back to the moment
of sunrise, how still the bay
was, and it seems far off,
as if it belongs to a
collection of poems translated from a
language you do not really know
well enough to code-switch with &
thus already in a form alien
to the original, as when in
english you write a haiku about
the sun rise, the placid bay.
Today is an unfamiliar form then.

Today is an unfamiliar form then.
The placid bay with its traffic
of rockfish and barges, the sun
for the seventy-first time on this
date in my life announcing its
yard sale to the squirrel who
grazes on my deck (how many
squirrels in my lifetime on how
many decks). The english words arranging
themselves for haiku rather than blank
verse. We say in english sun
rise although in english we also
know better know that it is
our spinning that somehow fails to
dislodge the squirrel who forages on
my deck for bird food the
woodpecker has dislodged from the feeder.
Dawn goes down to day. English
words, words Shakespeare coaxed into blank
verse, words that have survived physics
experiments, that have worked their way
out of the engineering of prefixes.
O unperturbed the squirrels feed on
fallen seed!  We are all foragers.