"Daylight saving": a poem

Daylight saving

The morning after the time change

sets you back on your heels a little.

An hour’s worth of light has been given

to the evening instead, and when you wake,

you can’t help but miss that bright piece of time.

But when you step out at dawn and breathe

the cool, fresh air, you realize 
you haven’t been cheated of anything. Not 
when a black checkmark of geese 
flies over, leaving its stamp of approval

on the gray-gold page of sky.

************** 

I wrote this poem a year ago in mid-March, right around the time we switched to Daylight Saving. But last year it wasn't -16 degrees Celsius on the Sunday morning the way it was today! I had to walk to church early for practice with the music team this morning, and as I stepped outside at 7 a.m. into the breathtakingly cold air, I thought, Okay, this is not quite the kind of morning I was talking about in that poem.

But in fact it was a beautiful morning: cold, yes, but clear and fresh. There were no geese, but the crows and cardinals were awake and filling the air with their voices, and the sky was that exact gray-gold colour I had in mind when I wrote the poem.

Then as I crossed through Churchill Park, I saw something shiny on the stone ledge that marked the end of the pathway. It was a gold-coloured watch. Someone must have lost it, and another passerby placed it there hoping the owner would find it. Someone does "miss that bright piece of time," I thought.

As I went on my way, I savoured the beauty of the seasons, the wonder of sunrise, the sound of birds, and (in spite of the temperature) the signs of springtime all around me.

************** 

Photo by Bill Abbott (Blue, gray and gold, my favorite sky)

CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]

via Wikimedia Commons