Famous First Light Poems by Famous Poets

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• First Light Poems by Members
• Best First Light Poems by Members
• First Light Quotes

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...someow running backwards now
through the Moog Synthesizer of time
Chaos unscrambled
back to the first
harmonies
And the first light...Read more of this...

...his little beach at the end 
of the world is anywhere, and I 
stand in a stillness that will last 
forever or until the first light 
breaks beyond these waters. Don't 
be scared, the book said, don't flee 
as wave after wave the breakers rise 
in darkness toward their ghostly crests, 
for he has set a limit to the sea 
and he is at your side. The sea 
and I breathe in and out as one. 
Maybe this is done at last 
or for now, this search for what 
is never here. Maybe all that ...Read more of this...

...old candles, melted, and bent.

I do not want to look at them; their form saddens me,
and it saddens me to recall their first light.
I look ahead at my lit candles.

I do not want to turn back, lest I see and shudder
at how fast the dark line lengthens,
at how fast the extinguished candles multiply....Read more of this...

...1 

Dawn. First light tearing 
at the rough tongues of the zinnias, 
at the leaves of the just born. 

Today it will rain. On the road 
black cars are abandoned, but the clouds 
ride above, their wisdom intact. 

They are predictions. They never matter. 
The jet fighters lift above the flat roofs, 
black arrowheads trailing their future. 

2 

When the night comes sma...Read more of this...

...Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
...Read more of this...

...,
of your year of pain and despair remitted briefly
now and then by hope that had that leaden taste?
Did you glimpse in first light the world as you loved it
and see that, now, it was not wrong to die
and that, on dying, you would leave
your beloved in a day like paradise?
Near sunrise did you loosen your hold a little?
How could you not already have felt blessed for good,
having these last days spoken your whole heart to him,
who spoke his whole heart to you, so that in the ...Read more of this...

...r-present torment, far from me in the magnificent noise of
oyster shells crushed by a night owl passing a restaurant at first light.
If you only knew.
Far from me, willed, physical mirage.
Far from me there's an island that turns aside when ships pass.
Far from me a calm herd of cattle takes the wrong path, pulls up stubbornly at the
edge of a steep cliff, far from me, cruel woman.
Far from me, a shooting star falls into the poet's nightly bottle.
He corks it right away and f...Read more of this...

..., " he said. "Pass the salt. "

 The tackle was already in the car, so we just got in and

drove away. Beginning at the first light of dawn we hit the

road at the bottom of the mountains, and drove up into the

dawn.

 The light behind the trees was like going into a gradual

and strange department store.

 "That was a good-looking girl last night, " he said.

"Yeah, "I said. "You did all right. "

"If the shoe fits....." he said.

 Owl Snuff Creek was just a small creek, on...Read more of this...

...

cooking on the hot plate.









 THE SURGEON





I watched my day begin on Little Redfish Lake as clearly as

the first light of dawn or the first ray of the sunrise, though

the dawn and the sunrise had long since passed and it was

now late in the morning.

 The surgeon took a knife from the sheath at his belt and

cut the throat of the chub with a very gentle motion, showing

poetically how sharp the knife was, and then he heaved the

fish back out into the lake.

 T...Read more of this...

...en the numbed pines. 
 Night after night 
 For four long months 
 My face to her dark face 
 We two had lain 
 Till the first light.

Civilization comes to Sierra Kid

 They levelled Tater Hill 
 And I was sick. 
 First sun, and the chain saws 
 Coming on; blue haze, 
 Dull blue exhaust 
 Rising, dust rising, and the smell. 

 Moving from their thatched huts 
 The crazed wood rats 
 By the thousand; grouse, spotted quail 
 Abandoning the hills 
 For the sparse trail 
 On whic...Read more of this...

...First light. This misted field 
 is the world, that man 
 slipping the greased bolt 

back and forth, that man 
 tunneled with blood 
 the dark smudges of whose eyes 

call for sleep, calls 
 for quiet, and the woman 
 down your line, 

the woman who screamed the loudest, 
 will be quiet. 
 The rushes, the grassless shale, 

the dust, whiten like droppings. ...Read more of this...

...ing through the wind, 
when its breath hissed at the earth; 
as we leaned out of the window 
in that moment when the first light
streaked, joyous, out of the unalterable street... 

Then, tuned to the immanent choir of the grassland, 
untangling from the sea -

Then, stripped to the last detail, from her sinewed skin, 
disheveled in the light, one aria from the immaculate concertina -

before her rebirth
a tongue licked through the core of my soul


ii
Strang...Read more of this...

...journal found on his person

 At night wakened by the freight 
 trains boring through the suburbs 
 of Lyon, I watched first light 
 corrode the darkness, disturb 
 what little wildlife was left 
 in the alleys: birds moved from 
 branch to branch, and the dogs leapt 
 at the garbage. Winter numbed 
 even the hearts of the young 
 who had only their hearts. We 
 heard the war coming; the long 
 wait was over, and we moved 
 along the crowded roads south 
 not looking for wha...Read more of this...

...before
That Lamb of God adore,
That Lamb whose days great kings and prophets wished
And longed to see, but missed.
The first light they beheld was bright and gay
And turned their night to day,
But to this later light they saw in Him,
Their day was dark, and dim....Read more of this...

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