Before Dawn is a poetry collection written by Sapardi Djoko Damono: with contents written from 1961 to 2001, portraying the poet at different stages of life. Opened by "One Night", written in 1964 when he was a young Moslem boy crying outside a church door as his classmates celebrated Christmas, the book ends with "Before Dawn", written in 2001 when he was much older, pondering about frailty and mortality. Through his poems--the meaning, the sounds, the rhythm--Sapardi has proven himself capable of depicting the imaginative awareness of experience.