The Unusual And Inspiring Quality Of The Light

This is a poem that I wrote about the eclipse this morning.

 

The Unusual And Inspiring Quality Of The Light

A man from the BBC -

a reporter from a

regional news program -

called at our place of work

with small film crew

in tow.

With one eye downcast

upon the makeshift pinhole cameras,

fashioned from teabag boxes,

that bobbed like shipwrecks

atop an overflowing

waste paper basket

in our lobby,

he enquired as to

our impressions

of the recent semi-eclipse.

We each thought back

to the muted gloom

of 9:30am. 

 

An overcast sky

like the inside

of a cataract

that revealed nothing.

And silently we pondered

and searched for the words

that would not mark us as liars

nor as failures, unable to find

anything profound in the

in the understated

magnificence of creation.

Sheila, as always, spoke first:

“It was,” she said,

“a bit like last Wednesday.”

Then Daniel, who

does watercolours,

remarked upon the unusual

and inspiring quality of the light.

But later he confided

that the light was poor

and he would never

have painted in it.

Agatha said that there

had been a cold wind.

While I, standing

behind and to one side of

the young researcher,

watched her write down

'cold wind?' in a notebook

as if awaiting confirmation

of this detail

from other sources,

possibly next door

at Abigail's Tearooms.

As the film crew

were getting ready to leave

Colin told them that,

on the way into work,

he had seen on the back

of a flat-bed lorry

an escalator

“like the ones you get in department stores”

wrapped-up in plastic

The young researcher dutifully wrote

the word “escalator?” in her notebook

and they politely thanked us

and went on their way

and we never 

saw them again 

or our faces on

the local news.

But a few days later

in the free local paper

I saw a photograph

of an escalator

rampant on the

back of a truck

The picture taken

from a crouched position

at the foot of the

frozen metal stairs

with the camera pointed upward

towards the mid-morning dimness

where the sun

should have been.

They had captioned it

'Stairway to heaven'.