<b>"Daybreak" - Jude Rittenhouse</b>

Outside my window
fog softens the shock
of morning. I float
out of dreams
to a statue game

of the trees.
It looks as if they
might break
their frozen poses—
go back to their lives

as children.
Back to running,
playing, napping, back to
their mothers’
protecting branches.

Except, they know
too much. You can see it
in their skin:
wrinkled, weathered, hard
as furniture.

One arches back
and stretches arms wide—
a singer
whose heartbreaking ballad
is ending.

To the right, another
raises hands to the sky—
a preacher proclaiming
damnation. Around these two
stand a mob of watchers,

some reaching out
to touch the performers
but many
just falling
asleep in the fog.

Jude Rittenhouse teaches and works as a freelance editor, but considers her work conducting writing workshops for shelter residents (women and children survivors of domestic violence) at the Women’s Resource Center of South County, RI, to be her most important. Her poetry has won several prizes and has been published in Crone’s Nest, Pudding Magazine, Sistersong, Freedom Is Just Another Word, and Feathers, Fins and Fur. Forthcoming in 2000: Here’s to Humanity and Jane’s Stories II. Her second book of poems, Going East Against the Sun, is dedicated to Christine Andrews Moyes, August 30, 1946—October 13, 1999.