Imagine this moment: you wake up earlier than the morning, outside is the haze of streetlights. Happiness comes from not having to face the daylight just yet. In this silence, your hearing becomes amplified—the sound of wheels turns into human crawling, while silence itself traverses the eternal night.
“Listen—A Quiet Welcome” is not a “peaceful morning poem”. It is a meditation on consciousness before daylight—before social demand, before judgment—and on listening as resistance, not yielding, not burning yet. It contrasts modern speed and AI with human trembling and refusal, moving toward the subtle intimacy of distance—a gesture the poem achieves with delicacy.
With precision, it traces our shared modern condition: in an age of roaring AI, how do we preserve a deep breath amid the high-speed rush, and greet that “quiet welcome”?
Listen—A Quiet Welcome
By Cathy Xinman
Awake,
I am calm.
I thought it was morning
with the haze of street lamps.
I feel happiness
because I am not facing the day directly.
I wake earlier than morning.
Heaven and earth move day and night without pause.
I like waking up,
the midnight’s quiet hearing,
like a reader of letters,
inventing, forgetting, and escaping.
If there were no invincible sun,
you would surely say—
it is night.
Time keeps staring at the empty street.
Let the morning’s choir on the road sing—
except for the crowded human traces,
I have nothing.
The sound of wheels scraping the ground
is like the way humans crawl—
chasing, or pleading.
Come, AI,
carry us into the air with wings.
How high-speed—
humans have never ceased to run,
as if before a suspended gavel,
trembling yet refusing to bow.
I scan the light,
the faint skin.
Silence is crossing the endless night
like blindness groping for soundless light.
The vanished waking shrugs its shoulders.
I like the feeling of night:
it proves I am still in pursuit.
It belongs to me,
to what has not yet burned.
Look—an unopened invitation.
I feel distance.
How intimate it is.
I have a morning;
it is waiting for me.
Listen—
a quiet welcome.
Cathy Xinman writes poetry in English and Chinese. Find her English-language collection, Where You Love Yourself, on Amazon. You can also hear her poetry on her TikTok page. Learn more about the communities that make up Canada on the Toronto Spark website. The Toronto Spark is on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
