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Myra Schneider

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Looking at Light

 

The sun is a ball that drops, rises, swings forward, suddenly
becomes a shell cracking and spilling crimson yolk
across quiet blue. I pick out a network of winter-thin trees.

Tyre heaps pinken in a yard, cables dazzle, the steel girders
over the track begin to melt and nothing in the city
is dismal any more for light’s touch has transformed

every ash-grey patch, patched roof, every pinched road,
grimeladen bridge. Even the bends in pipes are beautiful
as long-necked birds. Already the sky is paling

and I want to hold each second before the bright colours
all leach out, before the day folds away like a butterfly into
the cold dark and is taken for ever. It cannot be –

but surely it cannot be that when a leaf drops, a life stops, it’s as if
it has never been? Surely the mind, its searches and sharings,
joys and compassions, will sift into jumbles of roofs, into roots,

into the smoky wings of downward pigeons from the station’s struts
and the passengers who are now crowding towards the exit,
into the irises and lips of selves yet to come into being?

 

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