Music for the Night, Music for the Day
       

To have been a farmer's bride,
rising alone, eating toast and sausage

before waking the children, husband
already out in the barn, collecting tools

for the day's work, or on a cold morning,
littering the floor with splinters of wood.

Instead, I married a poet and his child
who lie awake listening to the night,

who darken their rooms against the morning light
that I still revere no matter how I wed.

They pose questions to the dark,
follow the phases of the moon, speak to

its many eyes and mouths. From those dark
spaces they hear music, soft and indiscernible

to me, songs loosened by a beam of light
from the hall or my own voice calling out

to those chords. Lover of the morning,
I swoon to the crow's rough call and the dove's

soft whisper. They court the barred owl's
shivered chant, the dog's lonesome aria.

Each in our own worlds, I marry
the farmer and take my breakfast alone.

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Copyright © 2012 Julie Brooks Barbour All rights reserved
from Come To Me and Drink
Finishing Line Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission