Death and Waking

Musings on faith before daybreak.

Image by Martin Adams on Unsplash.

There is a certain expectation in the early morning, and even an obscured moon can charge a landscape with mystery and hope for the coming day. “Death and Waking” engages with that expectation and hopes in new life and new purpose. But more than just sitting in a kind of wistfulness, this poem recognizes this hope for a revitalized life is realized only through an active dying to self and a taking hold of something greater, and beyond me. This very act of death, of laying one’s own self down to take up something more, is the best kind of waking I have found.

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Death and Waking

Moon obscured, and stars alike,
and dawn yet kept at bay.
I am counted ’midst the few
awake ere break of day.

In these days within my heart
a new song wakes and rises — 
potent tunes takes over me,
a great and glorious cry:

a swelling shout for such a life
as yet I’ve never known.
This hopeful lamentation in
this soul’s a seed, deep-sown.

Lamentation — threnody it is,
for death here does abound:
to die to my own self I must,
for new life to be found.

Joyful dirge! Unsettling bliss!
My soul in me awakes,
and that is why I am ’midst the few
awake ere break of day.