Dawn creeps forward, a scout wriggling silently
toward the edge of an enemy encampment.
The yellow and orange that begin to bleed
into the pale blue are the yellow and orange of memory,
so that something utterly novel,
a new day unlike any before it,
raises tiny hairs of nostalgia on the neck.
What was comes between us and what is,
blinding us moment by moment, and yet
it’s the only way we have to understand anything.
This is like that, though that is not this.
In such a world we are always one step behind,
the sunrise does not become real until reflected in a puddle,
the morning cries of crows surprised to find it all beginning again
cannot be heard properly until they return
as echoes from across the lake.

Kurt Luchs (kurtluchs.com) has poems in Antiphon and Into the Void, and won the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. His books include a humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny), and a poetry chapbook, One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.