Sacrifice of Praise

As soon as I spoke it I knew
it was one of those words
that drops from my lips
and sinks to the ground
and moves along like dawn mists
as they pool in eddies in the low places.

Unlike the word I could have said
rising to meet the coming light
unassumingly tinted with such glorious hues
that the sleepy soul
cannot help but be stirred
to joy.

Sometimes it is so much easier to say the thing that need not be said, the dull or even selfish thing. How important, yet how much harder, it is to speak that which should be spoken, graceful expressions of thanks or wonder or love or encouragement.

For three years during high school I drove through beautiful countryside at dawn every morning to get to school. Those sunrises over the Grand river, with mists rising from the river and sliding along the ground, making the trees into layers of silhouettes, have been imprinted in my memory and are the inspiration for the imagery of this poem.