Dave Bonta's "Early" is only three short lines, but it holds a whole moment: the first light spreading over the sea, and an owl that hasn't yet gone to bed. The title tells us the hour. It's that thin stretch of time when night is ending and day hasn't quite taken over.
The speaker doesn't say how they feel, and that restraint is part of the effect. We get the sense of someone standing quietly, watching, glad to have caught something most people sleep through. The owl is "late," so it belongs to the night but is still out in the new light, hunting and playing at once. Those two words sit side by side without any fuss, as if survival and joy were the same motion for a bird.
The mood is calm, hushed, and a little wondering. Because the lines are so spare, you read slowly, and the poem feels like a breath held so as not to scare the owl away.