The first sunrise of my life I do not remember,
but my mother, every year,
tells of the way the world came up for air
after a day of blustering, blinding white winds.
In the midst of the worst snowstorm of a lifetime
(certainly my lifetime),
I woke. The glow of the cold sun
seeped thin and bare from behind sheer steel clouds.
I came to be not under the brilliant sunrise that carries painters to canvases,
nor the soft luminescence which pulls photographers from bar stools,
but the soundless gleam that calls the coyote to hunt
until she is satisfied.
