Unraveling Light

The river wakes before I do, silver fingers reaching through the dark— each ripple a small geography of what's to come.

Herons stand like meditation, one-legged certainty in the current, patient for the fish that know their names.

The sun doesn't arrive, it unfolds, pink against green, warming the stones we haven't yet discovered.

I am learning to exist in the pause between night and morning, where the world is still deciding what color to become.