Every morning, the rising sun invites and inspires us to begin again.—Debasish Mridha
COLD GRAY MORNING, despair heavy as wet wool on her shoulders; she stood at ocean’s edge, salt clinging to her skin, thoughts already past saving.
Each wave said yes to the shore and then pulled back. She understood that.
Sick, worn through, fading dreams buffeting her like offshore wind. She’d stopped counting what she’d lost.
It had become a season of if only and what if—the sky a gray with no bottom to it, no edges.
She thought about going quiet. Thought about leaving all the noise behind for good.
And then, something broke open out past the water. Not a metaphor. Just light, coming from wherever light comes from when you’ve stopped expecting it—gold bleeding into coral, spreading without asking permission.
She blinked. Throat tight. The sun just kept going, spilling across the surface as if it had somewhere to be, as if it didn’t know she’d almost decided otherwise.
It was only rotation. Physics. A cold star doing what cold stars do.
But something cracked loose in her chest anyway—not hope exactly, not yet—more like a door left open by accident, light falling through onto a floor she’d forgotten was there.
The colors on the water kept changing.
She kept watching. Breathless, not from beauty but from something older—the plain fact of still being here to see it.
She didn’t step back into life.
She stood there, cold. But she didn’t leave. That was enough.
That was, for now, everything.
Author’s Note
“Sunrise” started with a question I couldn’t shake: what keeps a person at the edge instead of going over it? Not the grand reasons, not family, not faith, not any of the things we’re supposed to say. Just the small ones. The accidental ones.
I thought about polar explorers. They were the astronauts of the nineteenth century, as one writer put it: people who pushed into the genuinely unknown and paid for it. Many died. And many who survived the six-month polar nights, black and edgeless as spacetime, collapsed into what journals of the era called soul-despairing depression. What saved them, over and over, wasn’t rescue. It was wonder: a seal surfacing through ice, aurora light bending overhead. Something so outside the self that the self, for a moment, stopped its noise.
I kept thinking about how wonder doesn’t announce itself. How it arrives as the sun arrives—indifferent, physical, not designed for you—and somehow gets in anyway.
The sunrise doesn’t save the woman in this prose poem. She’s just stopped by it, the wonder of it. There’s a difference. Salvation is a long project. But stopping—that’s available in a single moment. The light hits the water. The throat tightens. The decision to leave gets interrupted.
Liminal spaces do that. The ocean edge, the polar dark, the strange hour before dawn, they hold us in suspension long enough that something unexpected can reach us. Long enough for wonder to do its quiet, unglamorous work.
I wanted to write toward that. The moment before the turning, not the turning itself. The cold and the light arriving together. The fact that sometimes it’s enough just to still be standing there when the sun comes up.
Upcoming…
30 poems in 30 days:
NaPoWriMo, April 2026
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Despair, heavy as wet wool on her shoulders. Been there, and I can’t think of a more perfect metaphor. This poem is full of images and feelings that weave together, creating clear images of the senses. Exceptional!
Every phrase is a poem.