Early Every Morning by Melissa Campana

Early Every Morning

I never enjoyed having sleepovers

When they would take place at my friends’ houses

I’d wake up the next morning, all alone

With no one to talk to except my bear.

My friends, out cold as if they had been hit

On the heads with a sturdy two-by-four,

Wouldn’t wake for at least another hour.

An hour that I’d be left without breakfast

Or company to explore the backyard.

But when friends would sleep over at my house,

I’d have no problem getting up early

My mom would make me chocolate pancakes

And I’d have endless things to do at home

I could watch cartoons or make a birdhouse.

Once they’d wake up, we could do anything.

I never understood why it was that

My internal clock was set differently

From all of the other seven year olds’.

My mom says it’s due to my birthday time

Three past six in the morning with the birds.

It didn’t bother me too much until

I couldn’t sleep in even if I had

Stayed up until three doing my homework.

As I got older, my friends would wonder

Why I was up at seven on weekends

Immaturely they would laugh at my strange

Inability to sleep past sunrise.

It is even funnier for me, though.

I get to lie in the hammock, slowly

Swaying with the early morning patterns,

Drinking coffee and chatting up nature,

Each day something is different, either

A sound or a smell, the temperature

Of the fresh morning air, all adding up

To time better spent here than in a bed.

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Early Sunday Morning

BY EDWARD HIRSCH

I used to mock my father and his chums

for getting up early on Sunday morning

and drinking coffee at a local spot

but now I’m one of those chumps.

No one cares about my old humiliations

but they go on dragging through my sleep

like a string of empty tin cans rattling

behind an abandoned car.

It’s like this: just when you think

you have forgotten that red-haired girl

who left you stranded in a parking lot

forty years ago, you wake up

early enough to see her disappearing

around the corner of your dream

on someone else’s motorcycle

roaring onto the highway at sunrise.

And so now I’m sitting in a dimly lit

café full of early morning risers

where the windows are covered with soot

and the coffee is warm and bitter.