Ode to the Morning

Find the red flower
and the hummingbird hovering.
Find the bee
inside the tiger-colored blossom.
Don’t close your eyes.
Find the berry below the leaf.

Find the stacked stone wall
and the tremor inside the wall
and all of the tiny insects
who thrive there.
Find the stray seed
that turned into a melon,
the vole burrowed beneath
a mass of sun trumpets.

Beauty happens all around us.
If you find the owl
perched on the branch
listen and wait.
And if you hear the leaf speak,
don’t move.

Soon the coyote will howl
down from the mountain
and the flower will greet you,
its face on fire.

---

Geraldine Connolly is the author of four poetry collections: She received two N.E.A. creative writing fellowships, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The Georgia Review, and Shenandoah. It has been featured on The Writers Almanac and anthologized in Poetry 180 and The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her website is geraldineconnolly.com.