How many mornings
Awoken by tears
How many nights
Kept up by fears
How many times Death
Knocked at the door
Running away before
I could get there
“Come back!”
“You missed!”
Suffering is too great at times
To want to bear another minute
How many broken dawns cracked
Before day’s growing light
How many rivers flowed into the sea
Salty sadness running running
To the sea
Drowning in the waves of grief
Weighted down by guilt and shame
Longing only for relief
For someone to say my name
With love
What ungrateful, resentful steps
I took shrugging through those days
Looking only at my toes
Counting all my woes
Seeing only foes
I fell so many times
Lying on my back
Sprawled across the cracks
Splintered sidewalks sprouting weeds
Blue sky above me
So many hands helping me to my feet
So much love poured in and I
Well shielded watched it pour away again
There drummed a drum in time
Outside of these convincing temporary
Temporal constraints
I became a broken dawn
Unbearably made of light
Painfully awakening to my own role
In my plights
How through each shade of morning
I arise
I arise
Every broken dawn
Through each shade of mourning
I arise
A broken dawn
