Daybreak at the Marsh

by Jonathan Shipley

I deliver bread. That’s my job. I’m at the stores while you’re still asleep. I’m shelving bagels while you dream; displaying wheat bread just so; placing English muffins out long before your coffee pot begins to percolate.

I wake early for my job—dinner rolls and hot dog buns, powdered donuts and nacho chips—but I also wake early on my days off. I head to Cherokee Marsh for the birds and the quiet and the grass and the water and the sun at day’s break.

There is a poem out there, written in wind and leaves.

“Hello, sun on my face,” begins a poem by Mary Oliver. “Hello, you who make the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories …”

My poem would begin, “Hello, dear marsh, you who make the morning and spread it over the fields while frogs sing, warblers, too, in chorus, and into the faces of pasqueflowers and white trout lilies …”

I don’t particularly like my job. It’s unsatisfying. I do like driving to it. Everyone is still slumbering. Everyone’s days are yet to be. Everyone’s days are full of possibilities. It’s well-dark when I drive. There is no one on the road except sometimes a raccoon, or a deer. “I’ll see you later,” I tell them as I turn toward the Beltline. “At the marsh, I’ll see your kin.” I hope to.

“Best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness,” Oliver’s poem continues on.

I love to see is a sunrise through bare trees. A winter’s sunset in a forest is divine. It’s putting a king’s cloak on a naked pauper’s shoulders. The pauper is now regal with the light. The pauper feels it. The pauper knows it to be true.

The sun god Ra, in ancient Egypt, rose from the underworld each morning and traveled the sky by boat, in a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Hindus believe that the god Brahman creates the world anew each day. In the Gospels, the women who visited Jesus’ tomb on the third day saw the sunrise as a sign of his triumph over death.

What is it that you feel in the early mornings? What does the sun give you? What do you know to be true?

There is something that gives me a momentary pause at work, something that I appreciate. It’s that I’m at least providing sustenance to someone. This loaf will be eaten. These donuts will be shared. A family will gather over a barbecue with these hamburger buns. Children will share a bag of Takis on their lunch break at school before recess.

The sunrise, Oliver wrote, holds us “in the great hands of light—good morning, good morning, good morning.”

And it is a good morning: the Yahara River’s distant sparkle; the ponds clattering with mallards and red-winged blackbirds; the prairie grasses waving their hellos; and the trees on the hills crowned in gold. And I, a bread-delivering pauper, am also regally cloaked in sunlight. Daybreak at the marsh.

“Watch now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness,” Oliver’s poem ends.

I keep walking.