Sunrise Psalm
Craig W. Steele
“Dawn was breaking over the horizon,
shell pink and faintly gold…”
—J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Dawn’s light chases Ephialtes’
shadows back into their secret
caves, dispersing them about my
yard, beyond the fence and down the
road in all directions. Glowing
pink in every puddle where the
gold-eyed Eos bathes her face, it
burnishes the dewy leaves and
grass until they’re glinting like fine
crystal, brightening my way today.
______
Note: Ephialtes is the ancient Greek demon who causes nightmares.
Of Cryptograms and People
Craig W. Steele
“Absences align
And lock shapes into place,…”
—A.E. Stallings, “Jigsaw Puzzle”
Pattern recognition turns the
key to solving cryptograms,
dissembling typographic discourses:
substitution ciphers where
one letter lays a smokescreen
for another. And although
no letter will reveal
its veiled identity,
none can help but tell
you what it’s not, just as
a person’s actions will—
you simply need to heed
the fundamental choices
they don’t make.
Craig W. Steele is a professor of biology and health services at Edinboro University in northwestern Pennsylvania. In his continuing quest to become a widely read unknown poet, his poems appear in numerous anthologies, literary journals, and magazines. Besides Word Fountain, his poems recently appear or are forthcoming in The Lyric, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Mused: the BellaOnline Literary Review, Lighten Up Online and Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. He continues to write poetry as “The Writer’s Poet” for Extra Innings online.
Word Fountain 
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