Issue 16 | Winter 2015

First Light

The sun breaks like an egg over everything
east of here. Stop stop, enough enough,
the sparrows say—or that’s what Lao Wen says

they say in Chinese. Take your tarnished
horn, your wooden flute and break
this silence—alone beside the dark water, desperate

for the birds to get to work—delicate
as the last skin of ice on a winter river’s wrist.

 

Filed under: Poetry