Aubade

Bless the slow sharp light of spring

that woke us up early and how I go

through the motions: get up, wash face,

comb hair. Bless dirty clothes, the

small feet, the laces. Bless the bad

breakfast, the too-sweet snack. Bless

coats and arguing about them and seatbelts.

Bless the scary Christian daycare.

The long drive to work. The feeling

that I can’t go on. Bless the ugly

concrete buildings and the lawns trampled

by so many feet, seeded every year but

never green and the stairs that reach up

floor after floor. Bless no windows

and the long hall lit by buzzing

fluorescents but still dim. The pine

cleaner and sweat, the door, its tiny window,

the handle that never works. The door

that opens when I push and the step

over that jamb into the cinderblock room.

The desks made of woodpulp and

formaldehyde and plastic laminate

and the phones and the pens and the people

who show up today. Bless the ones

who look up and smile and the ones who do not,

the homework doers and the homework

don’ts and that someone already raised

the blinds and a little sun comes in and that

by the time I get to the front of the room

I have thought of something to say and that

doing this day after day makes a place

where they will say something back

to the dark and the silence

we blessedly come from.

Nancy White is the author of four poetry collections: Sun, Moon, Salt (winner of the Washington Prize), Detour (Tamarack Editions), Ask Again Later (Tiger Bark), and the forthcoming What She Said. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Review, FIELD, New England Review, Ploughshares, Rhino, and many others. She was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and has benefitted from residencies at MacDowell and A Room of Their Own. She serves as editor-in-chief at The Word Works in Washington, D. C.