Whispers of the Morning Tide

 Whispers of the Morning Tide

The sun breaks through a veil of sighs,
soft fingers stretching across the waking sky,
where shadows linger, hesitant,
like children afraid to step into the day.
A river murmurs secrets to the stones,
stones that have learned to listen
over centuries of patient silence,
their gray faces weathered
by wind, by rain, by time.

I walk along the edge of this waking world,
my shoes tracing lines in the sand
that the tide will steal before I am done.
The sea sings in waves,
not with words, but with memory,
echoes of ships that never returned,
of lovers who left footprints
that vanished in salt and sorrow.

Clouds gather like old friends,
talking in colors—
violet, ash, a hint of rose—
and the wind carries their stories
over the hills,
through fields of trembling wheat,
and into the heart of the forest
where the trees stand like watchful ancestors.

There is a fox here,
its coat a flame against green shadows,
its eyes two pools of night
reflecting the pulse of the world.
It pauses, senses me,
and for a heartbeat, we share the same breath,
the same understanding
that life is brief,
and beauty is a theft of time.

I hear a bell ringing somewhere
beyond the horizon,
soft and metallic,
not calling, not warning,
but simply existing,
a reminder that sound,
like love,
can linger long after the source is gone.

A heron lifts from the river,
wings slicing the sky with silver,
its shadow flickering over the water,
over the reeds that quiver
as if in applause.
I envy its freedom,
though I know I too carry wings,
folded, hidden,
waiting for the right wind to unfold them.

The trees lean closer as if listening,
their leaves whispering in the dialect of light,
and I find my thoughts wandering
to the small corners of life:
a child laughing in a courtyard,
an old woman humming at her window,
a stranger holding a door open,
a candle flickering against the dark.
All these fragments of humanity
spin together in a quiet constellation,
and I feel the pulse of the world
through the delicate threads of connection.

Rain begins, not with fury,
but with a gentle insistence,
a soft drumming on rooftops and leaves.
Each drop carries a story,
some lost, some found,
all shaping the soil of memory.
I lift my face and let the rain kiss me,
let it write poems in rivulets down my skin,
and for a moment,
I am both small and infinite.

The city waits at the edge of the horizon,
lights glimmering like distant stars,
and I know I will return,
return to noise, to faces, to the pulse of human desire.
But the forest, the river, the fox,
they have etched themselves inside me,
a secret map I can follow
when the world feels too loud.

Night approaches, soft and deliberate,
dragging shadows across the hills,
and the first star pierces the dark
like a thought breaking into clarity.
I whisper to it, though it cannot hear:
“Keep the stories safe.
Carry the whispers forward.
Let them live in someone else’s soul
as they have in mine.”

And as I walk back,
the tide returns to reclaim the shore,
stones cold beneath my feet,
the river murmuring its ancient refrain.
I realize that life is not the moments we keep,
but the moments we let flow,
the echoes we leave behind,
and the love we dare to scatter
like seeds across the infinite sky.

Tonight, I will dream
not of endings, but of continuations,
of rivers unbroken,
of footsteps meeting footprints,
of voices mingling with the wind.
And when the dawn returns,
I will rise again,
carrying the soft, unspoken poetry
of a world that never stops speaking,
if only we pause long enough to listen.