Little sleeper, little root—
breathe slow now.
Outside, the world is teaching itself
to you already:

Watch how the ragweed lifts its fleeces
in the cracked & empty lot
beside the trailer—how its stubborn bloom ignores
the burn pit
half-swallowed by the grasses.

Notice the creek’s low amble—
thin thread of a brown-painted blue–
let it be your eyes,
patient as breath in a sleeping chest.
It knows nothing.
It remembers.

See the light? Not the hard white
of the gas station lot at midnight,
but the orange floodlight: a slow star.
Let a moth-hung dark accompany
you there—watch its frail halo
slick on the damp grass
when the angle’s right.

You’ll inherit this:
the bent fence by the old root cellar,
the lying mockingbird
in the dry and rustling corn,
brown–sudden orange–
sulfur-yellow in the afternoon.

Inherit the rust, the runoff,
the stubborn ditch still carving
its name through the very mud.

And when the world feels thin—
like old paint over old wood—
remember the thrum of water
in the heat, the far train’s moan
which stitches all this together,
your own blood’s soft drum in your ears
against the quiet.

Rest here, small watcher.
Dream deep.

Tomorrow, we’ll learn the names
of flowers and weeds that thrive in gravel.
We’ll listen close to what the broken
things have to tell us,
over and over.