Waking is the one hour when it is hard to tell what is real, and Maya's poem stays inside that hour. A speaker lies with eyes closed, half asleep, trying to make a moment last. Under the tenderness sits a question the poem never answers: is the loved one actually there?
The first stanza sets up a quiet piece of logic. Birdsong arrives "each morning lately," and the speaker reads it as a message: "even before I wake / you are with me." The beloved is not in the room but in the sound, so the birds become a stand-in, an alarm clock that rings with one person's name. The word "lately" suggests a new habit, something the speaker is still discovering. The surface is slightly rough, with "I have woke" and a "than" where "that" seems intended. That roughness suits the voice, which sounds like thought spoken aloud in the first light rather than a polished statement.
The second stanza hands the poem over to the senses. With "eyes still closed," the speaker moves through hearing, taste and smell. The verbs are worth watching. The speaker listens "for" the breath, not "to" it, and people only listen for what they are not sure they will hear. Taste and scent come as memory: "I remember the taste of your lips," and a scent that is "lingering," a word for what is left behind once someone has moved on. Sight is the sense that would settle the matter, and the poem keeps it shut out. The intimacy is built from echoes and traces, which quietly hints that the closeness may not be as solid as the speaker wants it to be.
In the third stanza the emotion tightens. "There is no greater moment in my day" is a large claim, and the verb that follows is desperate: the speaker "cling[s]" to it "for every last second." Time becomes a countdown. Opening the eyes is something the speaker "ha[s] to" do, so reality arrives as an obligation, not a choice. Then the grammar slips. "Until I have to open my eyes / you may not be lying next to me" has no punctuation and no joining word to carry the thought across the line break, as if the sentence flinches at what it was about to say. The grammar falters just where the confidence does. The poem's rhythm also shows what is going on here. There is no rhyme, and the lines vary in length, following speech and breath more than any fixed beat. For a poem that is listening for breathing, that seems fitting.
Then comes the last line, alone: "But I know, that you want to be." Its isolation matters. After three even four-line stanzas, which feel like steady breaths, this single line works like a short exhale. The "But" turns the poem around, and the odd comma after "know" reads like a pause to steady oneself before saying something one needs to believe. The line also ends on "be," leaving the thought open, since "to be" lying there, to be present, to simply be. Notice, too, what the speaker does not say. It is not "you are here" or "you love me" but "you want to be." The comfort comes from the beloved's wish, not from their presence. The poem gives no reason for the absence, and the text suggests distance or separation without naming either, which leaves room for readers to supply their own.
The poem is not showy, and it does not need to be. Its plain words and ordinary morning setting carry a feeling most people will recognise, the urge to stretch the moment before the day demands facts. The gap between "may not be lying next to me" and "I know" is where it comes alive. It shows love as an act of faith, held up against evidence the speaker is not yet ready to see. It also shows how much feeling can sit in small choices, such as a preposition, a missing full stop or a one-line stanza.