Douglas Luman’s eight-line lyric turns the ordinary act of waking into a quiet crisis about time, duty, and belief. The speaker offers no event for the date September 7, 1980; the title simply fixes the poem to a particular day, as a clock face fixes a moment without explaining it. From the first line, the logic of waking is circular: “Today I have to wake up because / tomorrow I have to wake up.” The present tense is governed entirely by the next identical morning. That is the central idea: existence becomes a series of obligations that refer only to further obligations, and the speaker feels isolated in seeing that dutiful continuation as something fearful.
The poem’s construction enacts that circle. It does not rhyme, and its line lengths are irregular, but the clauses keep spilling over the line endings. “I presume / the geometry of a clock. So, I / wake up because I expect to be greeted // by either a circle or some stones.” Each ending becomes a new beginning. The repeated words “wake up,” “because,” and “tomorrow” mimic the turning of clock hands; they return without delivering progress. The last line, “wake up because tomorrow,” is deliberately incomplete. No verb or consequence follows after “tomorrow.” That missing ending is the poem’s formal image of its own problem: tomorrow is not a reason but a postponement.
The imagery is spare and sharply divided. “The geometry of a clock” turns time into something presumed, a shape known in advance. A circle is the obvious shape: hands returning to the same positions, days returning to the same command. But the speaker expects to be greeted “by either a circle or some stones.” A circle suggests recurrence; stones suggest something harder and more final—grave markers, cairns, silent objects that do not turn. The two possible greetings leave the speaker exposed, “out here / with my palms up.” The open palms may be read as supplication, surrender, or simply the posture of someone waiting for whatever the day will place in them.
The poem’s sharpest turn is the question, “How can I be the only / one afraid of piety.” The word “piety” usually carries approval—devotion, reverence, faithful observance. Here it becomes frightening, perhaps because the speaker has obeyed the clock’s ritual without believing in it. The line break isolates “only,” stressing the speaker’s sense of being alone in that fear. Even the punctuation resists climax: the question ends with a period, so it sounds less like an appeal than a flat, resigned observation. Waking itself, the poem implies, has become a kind of piety—an act repeated out of duty rather than desire.
What makes the poem significant is its compression. It uses the plainest possible action—having to get up—to expose a deeper exhaustion: a life run by circular time while the person inside it stands still. The date in the title becomes representative rather than autobiographical. Any morning can feel like September 7, 1980, when the only available answer to “why” is “because tomorrow.” In eight lines, with almost no adjectives and no elaborate metaphor, Luman turns the word “because” into both a hinge and a cage. That is the quiet power of the poem: it does not argue against duty or time, but makes the reader feel the weight of a routine that asks for obedience while offering no arrival.