Poems, short and quiet.

Nothing about this season is visible. I am a hand pushing through packed earth, a small white argument with the dark. People ask what I am growing. I tell them I don't know yet, only that the pushing has a direction and the direction is down. Somewhere above me, light is happening the way it always does, without asking. I do not envy it. I am learning that depth is a kind of arrival no one claps for. And when I finally break the surface let it be quiet. Let it smell like rain. Let me have been something before I was seen.

The city is still folding itself awake. A man sweeps last night off the pavement, the broom saying one sentence over and over: begin, begin. Steam from a tea stall climbs like a thought that forgot its owner. A stray dog sleeps in the shape of a comma. Nobody here is performing anything yet. I stand in the hour that belongs to no one and feel my own name loosen on my tongue. Who was I before I had a title? Someone who noticed things. Someone who still does.