The First Wonder of the Day

By Donald S. Yarab

Rotary dial wall phone — Photo by Rafael Duran on Pexels.com

What is the most mundane thing we can contemplate as we begin our day?

If we can find wonder in that—and I am certain that we can—then we may find both purpose and beauty in the entirety of the day.

So, as I rise, I may peer out the bedroom window. The sun may be shining, or the rain falling softly, greying the morning light. Either is wondrous. Or perhaps I catch sight of the automobiles scurrying along the street. What a marvel—internal combustion engines and electric motors, their complexity tucked beneath the quiet hum of daily ritual. When my grandfather was born, such machines were not part of his everyday world.

I may repair to the bathroom and avail myself of indoor plumbing—another miracle. I recall that my other grandfather, raised on a farm in his teenage years, spent that portion of his youth relying on an outhouse, as well as drawing water from a pump. What comfort we possess without second thought.

In the kitchen, I open the refrigerator. Its quiet, steady hum speaks of a world preserved—meats, fruit, leftovers—all waiting in climate-controlled stillness. My grandmothers told me of the icebox, and the blocks of ice melting slowly with the day. What we now take for granted once required vigilance and care.

I may glance at the telephone—though now it is not on the wall, but in my pocket, answering to no cord. And yet I remember the telephone of my earliest childhood: one line, fixed to the wall, with a coiled cord and no screen. No call waiting. No voicemail. Only the ring, the voice, the taking turns. We managed. We even cherished it.

And when we sought knowledge, we turned to the bookshelf. A full set of encyclopedias, already well out of date, stood like solemn guardians of learning. We flipped through pages, cross-referenced entries, sometimes found what we sought. And if not—we went to the library. The card catalog was our compass, the stacks our pilgrimage. The answers came more slowly, but the seeking deepened our understanding.

I remember it all: a single television with three channels that went dark each night, a record player, a radio that belonged to my father and was not to be touched. I wore hand-me-down clothes from older cousins on the first day of school, and my mother sewed my pants with love and care. And we felt rich.

And now? A world of convenience surrounds us—lights, warmth, water, knowledge, sound, connection—available in an instant. But it is easy to forget that each of these was once impossible, then improbable, then a luxury.

Today, some cry out in anger for a past that never truly existed. They long for a myth, not a memory. But I find more strength, and far more truth, in simply being present—and being grateful.

To begin the day in wonder is to begin it rightly. For wonder is not the fruit of novelty, but of attention. It is not found in having more, but in seeing more deeply.

To begin in wonder is to begin in gratitude. And to begin in gratitude is to begin in truth.

The Orange Sentinels

In honor of the seasonal watchmen of the Ohio Turnpike

My friend John W. called me while he was traveling the Ohio Turnpike and noted the abundance of orange barrels delaying his journey. I quickly quipped that he should be happy the Orange Sentinels, for which Ohio is justly famed, were guarding his way. And then I composed the following short poem in his honor—and in honor of the Sentinels lining his path:

The Orange Sentinels
Each spring, they bloom—
Not in gardens, but on shoulders and medians,
Where asphalt warms and groans beneath the sun.
Tall and mute, they stand in solemn rows,
Garbed in Day-Glo regalia,
Their mission unclear, their presence unyielding.
Some say they guard progress, others delay.
To us, they are the high priests of frustration,
An order eternal, sanctioned by no god we trust.
Ohio’s own bitter blossom.

Betwixt Dawn and Dusk: A Meditation on Life and Dream

Preface

The first lines of this poem came to me in the night—those strange hours when thought and dream pass like shadows through the mind. I awoke briefly, not fully, and the phrase lingered: between and betwixt dawn and dusk… and the inverse, between and betwixt dusk and dawn. I held onto it until morning, when I set it down in full light. The poem that followed is a meditation on those intervals—the thresholds of consciousness and the veils through which the soul moves in its waking and its dreaming.

What begins as a reflection on the daily arc—from sunrise to sunset—soon turns inward, toward the more uncertain passage between dusk and dawn, where memory, time, and identity unravel and reweave. The Heraclitean epigraph provides the key: “The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” Yet even that distinction, perhaps, is not so firm as it seems.

The accompanying painting—Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket—mirrors the poem’s atmosphere: its drift between form and dissolution, its reverent wondering, its silence punctuated by brief illumination. Together, word and image ask not what life is, but whether it is lived or dreamed—and what remains of us in either case.

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket
James McNeill Whistler (c. 1872–1877)
Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 46.6 cm (23.7 × 18.3 in)
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit — James McNeill Whistler, *Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket*
c. 1872–1877 | Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 46.6 cm
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit

Betwixt the Spheres

by Donald S. Yarab

“The waking have one common world,
but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.”
—Heraclitus, Fragment 89

Betwixt the dawn’s gold-burnished, trembling rise,
And evening’s hush where embered echoes gleam,
A soul drifts outward under waking skies—
Or inward, through the latticework of dream.

Morning declares the world as firm and real,
Noon lays its claim in certainties and fire,
Yet twilight draws the veil we cannot feel,
And sings the hush of unfulfilled desire.

The hours fall like leaves from unseen trees,
Their passage soft, impermanent, and strange.
Some name it life, who walk it by degrees—
While others call it dream, and feel no change.

So tell me, when the final light has flown,
And silence hangs, unbroken and immense—
Was it a road we walked, and called our own,
Or but a fleeting spark in dream’s pretense?

But what of time when sun has slipped from sight,
And stars drift forth like seeds of the unknown?
What voice is heard within the hush of night,
When all the world lies still, and we—alone?

Between and betwixt the dusk and morning’s grace,
A different kind of being comes to bloom:
Where shadows speak, and time forgets its place,
And long-dead voices gather in the gloom.

In sleep, the veil grows thin, the borders bend,
And hours bleed into realms that none can chart.
The soul recalls what lies beyond the end,
And bears the hush of ages in its heart.

These hours are not lost—they are the deep,
The ocean floor where buried visions gleam.
From them we rise, like wanderers from sleep,
Still marked by fire, still echoing the dream.

So stands the soul, on thresholds vast and wide,
Between and betwixt the turning of the spheres—
What seemed a life, a dream walks at its side,
Measured not in hours, but in wonder—and in tears.

My Friend, You Were There: A Reflection on Complicity

History shows that evil rarely marches under banners we immediately recognize. Too often, it comes draped in righteousness, purity, and fear. This piece is a lament for how easily we have been—and still can be—drawn into the machinery of cruelty.

My Friend, You Were There

My friend,
When the Holy Catholic Church, seeking to preserve the Faith in all its radiant purity,
instituted the Inquisition,
you were there—
not as a bystander,
but as a willing voice.

You denounced the old widow,
who lived alone with her cat.
You whispered against the Jewish family—
familiar, yet forever marked as other—
and gave your assent to their undoing.

You crowded into the square to watch the trials.
You sang hymns
as the flames crowned their bodies with smoke.
You wept tears of joy
that the world was made purer that day.

My friend,
When the ships came heavy with human cargo,
and the auction blocks stained the soil,
you were there.

You placed your bids.
You weighed their flesh.
You wrote the laws that chained their children.

You sang hymns on Sunday,
and broke their backs on Monday.
You called it providence.
You called it order.

My friend,
When the traders came with flags and rifles,
when the rivers flowed with rubber and blood,
you were there.

You signed the charters.
You counted the profits.
You sold the shackles and the scales.

You called it commerce.
You called it destiny.

My friend,
When the banners of the Reich unfurled,
and the drums of destiny beat their hollow call,
you were there.

You shouted with the crowds
as glass shattered from shopfronts.
You signed the letters,
you cheered the laws,
you raised your hand high in salute.

You bought the house,
the shop,
the art your neighbors were forced to leave behind.

You praised the strong hand
that swept away the weak.
You rejoiced as neighbors vanished,
grateful that your streets were made clean.

My friend,
When Stalin summoned the will of the people
to root out the enemy within,
you were there.

You reported the whispered doubts
of your cousin,
your friend,
your brother.

You paraded with red flags
while the trucks rumbled into the night.
You filled the quotas.
You seized the land.
You counted the spoils
as others disappeared.

You sang of the bright tomorrow
as you cast your eyes down
and stepped over the absent.

My friend,
When Mao lifted the Little Red Book,
and the children cried out against their fathers,
you were there.

You led the chants.
You scrawled denunciations across the walls.
You struck the old professor who dared to hesitate.
You cheered as the temples fell,
and the old poems burned,
convinced you were building a paradise
on the bones of the past.

My friend,
When Pol Pot promised that the fields
would bloom with new life,
you were there.

You marched the teachers into the paddies.
You pointed the rifle.
You praised the year zero
that would erase the memory of all that came before.

You smiled
as the world was reborn in silence.

My friend,
When the generals rose in the name of order,
when the prisons filled and the stadiums overflowed,
you were there.

You nodded at the names.
You counted the profits.
You watched the blindfolded taken at night.

You called it security.
You called it salvation.

My friend,
You have always been there.

Only too late did you realize.
Only too late did you doubt—
but not much.

You fell silent,
lest you betray your doubt.
You looked away,
lest you see.

You told yourself it would be different this time.
You told yourself you had learned.
But the signs are familiar.
The words are familiar.
The silence is familiar.

And it is happening again.

Elegy for the Automatons: A Reflection on Political Decline in the Orwellian State

The Disquieting Muses by Giorgio de Chirico
(1916-18, oil on canvas) — The Disquieting Muses (1916-18) by Giorgio de Chirico
(97.16 cm × 66 cm, oil on canvas)

Preface

This poem, Elegy for the Automatons, was inspired by George Packer’s article The Hollow Men, which appeared in the May 2025 issue of The Atlantic. Packer’s article examines the political and moral collapse of certain American officials—Speaker Mike Johnson, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who, once defenders of democratic principles, surrendered themselves to the inverted realities demanded by Donald Trump’s authority and his increasingly Orwellian authoritarian state.

Echoing the pivotal scene in Orwell’s 1984 where a Party orator is handed a note and instantly redirects his vitriol toward a different enemy “mid-sentence, without a pause,” Packer documents how key Republican figures performed their own breathtaking reversal on Ukraine policy, and describes how these officials pivoted instantly from celebrating Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s aggression to denouncing Ukraine as the enemy—all in service to Trump’s shifting personal allegiances and contempt for democratic values.

Packer also invokes Henri Bergson’s insight that the mechanical within the human evokes both laughter and horror. Yet what he describes transcends mechanical reflex: it is the slow hollowing-out of conscience itself. Once-thoughtful men become fluent automatons, mouthing words disconnected from belief, loyalty, or memory.

This poem seeks to render in elegiac form the sorrowful descent of a free polity into ritualized untruth, and the transformation of human beings into instruments of submission.

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”
— T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Elegy for the Automatons

In the year when the hollowing began,
and Orwell’s warning stirred too late,
it came not by fire nor iron decree,
but smiling, in the face of one man.
He bore no heavy crown, no burning sword;
only the gift of inversion:
truth was a lie, loyalty a whim,
freedom the mask of power.
A man for whom cruelty was a virtue,
and truth a broken toy at his feet;
a man who measured loyalty by abasement,
and called the strong weak and the weak strong.

Under his gaze, the names of enemies blurred,
history curled back on itself like smoke;
words, having lost their anchor, floated
as banners torn from any mast.
And a people once proud of remembering
forgot that they had ever known another day.

From this hour of unmooring
emerged the hollowing of men.

Johnson, first among the fallen,
fumbled for strength among hollow phrases,
mouth heavy with the weight of borrowed words.
Behind his thickened glass, a flicker died—
and he mistook its ashes for light.

Graham, quick to find the favor of the wind,
circled the ruin with the laughter of forgetting,
shedding oaths like old garments,
spinning from vow to vow as a moth to a dying flame,
faithless to all but the empty crown of belonging.

Rubio, once proud in the defense of liberty,
sank into the yellow chair of forgetting,
listening to the slow departure of his own voice.
Once he cried for the dignity of nations;
now he stitched the banners of surrender with empty hands.

Thus were men unmade,
not by terror, nor by war,
but by the patient grinding of truth into noise,
by the slow machinery of convenience and fear.

And we, who watched,
sang no hymns for these men,
built no statues to mark their days.
They passed like shadows over a broken dial,
automatons grinding down the hour,
till even the dust forgot their tread.