Dawn Revisited
- Dawn Revisited
Imagine you wake up with a second chance: The blue jay hawks his pretty wares and the oak still stands, spreading glorious shade. If you don’t look back,
the future never happens. How good to rise in sunlight, in the prodigal smell of biscuits— eggs and sausage on the grill. The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open to a blank page. Come on, shake a leg! You’ll never know who’s down there, frying those eggs, if you don’t get up and see.
Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is former Poet Laureate of the United States. Her seventh collection of poems, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, will be published by W.W. Norton in April, 1999. The most recent of her many honors are the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, the 1996 National Medal in the Humanities, the 1997 Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award, the 1997 Sara Lee Frontrunner Award, and the 1998 Levinson Prize for Poetry magazine. Ms. Dove’s song cycle Seven for Luck, set to music by John Williams and featured with the Boston Pops on PBS, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in July 1998, and her play The Darker Face of the Earth, which will open at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles in March 1999, has been performed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Crossroads Theatre of New Jersey, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
