My Mother’s birthday is on New Year’s Day and on a lovely day, I took her and Dad for a drive up to Sorrento so that she could enjoy the beautiful views of the Indian Ocean. My Mum loves the sea. As we were getting ourselves settled into a nice new cafe for lunch, she passed the remark that “the trouble with mornings is that they are too short”.

This poem is for my Mum – although at 89 that day, she may not have had all these ideas in mind about mornings when she spoke. 🙂 However she assures me that she loves both her mornings and my gift for her. The rose is special, too. It’s from a bush I had planted and I took the first rose that bloomed to her, when she was in RPH. It was the day she was having her surgery for lung cancer, and we both remembered that. I believe the rose bush still blooms at Beatty Ave, in East Vic Park.

MORNINGS

There is only one thing wrong with mornings
They are too short.
By eleven thirty, your morning is in tatters,
Its azure transparent wings ripped and torn
No more flight this morn.

If you are lucky, a morning might extend
until a late lunch.
Letting your indulgences drift indolently
Until one or even one thirty before sharply
rapping you awake.

Mornings can be exultant, thrusting you unwittingly
into the fray of life.
A morning taken in full flood brings a joy
and sense of fulfillment in life that an
afternoon will never know.

The soft sensual pleasure of early morning love
is exquisite, superb.
The rising sun and growing daylight spill their light
upon the delicate beauty of your face as your
soul surrenders to me.

Mornings are the time to renew your promises
to love and life itself.
Open your eyes, see everything that augurs well
and dismiss the spirits of the night that portend
aught but love and joy.

Come, my love. Run, run away with me in this
bright and lovely dawn.
We will know nothing of afternoons with their
dreary darkening skies and fading light, for we
are morning’s child.