Mary Oliver’s “Why I Wake Early” adapted for my own mornings.

Hello, quiet house.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it through the kitchen window
and under the closed doors
and onto still sleeping bodies
and into still small dreams, even, over the
soon-to-be noisy and relentless —

best preacher that ever was,
dear stillness, that just happens
to be here as well as almost gone,
to keep us from burning out,
to ease us back into life and its demands,
to hold us in the day’s infancy –
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.