“After all, the great lesson is that no special natural sights—not Alps, Niagara, Yosemite or anything else—is more grand or more beautiful than the ordinary sunrise and sunset, earth and sky, the common trees and grass.”
— Walt Whitman
In the hush before the world remembers
its aches,
a breathless hush—
the prairie sleeps beneath a silk of silver mist,
dreaming in wildflower tongues.
Peace comes first like a whisper,
a hush in the hollows,
a mother’s palm on the fevered brow of night.
Then light unfurls—
not rising but becoming—
as if the sky had spilled her soul in slow surrender.
The sun, half-asleep, stretches
golden fingers through the grass,
and the world inhales.
Hawks script poetry on the air in widening circles,
their wings stilled by wind’s invisible hand.
Cattle stand like statues, prayerful,
facing east as if forgiveness had a direction.
The sky becomes a language of mercy,
spoken in shades of rose and tarnished copper,
while the earth, wide-eyed, listens.
No clocks tick here.
Only the hush of now,
a sacred middle between was and will be.
And when the light leans westward,
tired from holding the day,
the sky performs her final confession—
a slow bleed of fire and bruised indigo.
She does not beg to stay.
She bows.
Then comes the stillness again.
Not silence, but grace.
Not absence, but promise.
Peace is not the sunrise,
nor the sunset.
It is the breath between them—
long, low, and holy.