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By Laurie Klein Dear night-shifters, we robins get it. And yet . . . we exult: we get rowdy as dawn silhouettes emerge, by degrees—evergreens, silos and spires, high-rise towers eclipsing cutouts of brightening sky. We are your soundtrack. Maybe you’re counting down minutes; perhaps you yawn as you dress, accepting again, daybreak’s pilgrimage, seemingly unsung, complete with lanyard and badge. Guten tag, keen-eyed hunters, and fishers, baiting your hooks; G’day, human anchors rehearsing the news. People of prayer and praise: we relate! Bongiorno, officers heeding the call, in the name of the siren. Dear drivers and EMTS, un-applauded, we also refuel, repair, deliver. Yo, truckers, and dolers of donuts; Ho, fry cooks firing up short-order altars. Dairy folk, too, and nursing mothers: Bonjour. Shelf stockers, janitors, medical peeps—who provision and clean and cure—keep making your rounds, while priests of the ether and thumb scrollers commandeer coffeeshop tables, checking the social pulse. Call on us now, by nature improbable angels keeping time, as we call on you: cousins of rapture, keeping the faith, Hola. Alo. Hello. Laurie Klein is the author of Where the Sky Opens and Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh. A grateful recipient of the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, she lives in the Pacific Northwest and blogs, monthly, at lauriekleinscribe.com.
Laurie's other work on Foreshadow: Private, as the Small of a Back (Poetry, October 2023)
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