WALKING AT SUNRISE

I walked at sunrise yesterday, pink-orange paintwork

spreading wide in the East and coating vapour trails,

each dipped – no drips – for just a moment, in a tin,

hidden from human eyes, like (I surmise) the smocks and brushes.

Once coloured, they striped the sky at random angles,

criss-crossing, and I thought of tangled oriental characters

twisted and bent into a riddle.

 

Two thoughts took shape: was I right to blurt surprise

that this work, so simple, so beautiful, had never before

arrested my gaze; and second, a childish wish, a fleeting naïve notion,

that I might make something of this discovery, make something of me,

might sit at some Master’s knee and trade nature’s nuances.

How marvellous to catch and pocket these orangey spears,

with pinking shears the world’s least urgent inventions.

 

But as I rushed to steal away, with every step

the colour scheme and shapes dissipated, faded away –

as I should have expected at least a dozen dawn morning moments back,

way back when the colour first flooded and hurried round

the gaps between the lumpy, stubborn winter clouds; and made it

clear that there was no scope for piggy-back on any part at all

of this dazzling, dreamy paint display.

 

And I should have expected that the sky would shun

any ingenuous, amateur assertion of rights in respect of

the sun, its place and the use, however derivative, of any

feature, fold or story told from representations of its ancient face.

For few of us can fully embrace the scale of the task, each day to

orchestrate the antics of the winds and their weathers, then

lock them loosely but firmly together and

 

daub them in pastels with feather-filled pillows,

making light work of responding to each and every call –

and a call must include not only that of simple minds

which assume inheritance for so long as permitted to remain;

but also of people and things who dare broach the sun

and whose domains may extend to the fires and furnaces

that would roast me in a moment, no carbon footprint.

 

Speaking of which...my eyes open and I see my feet, unscathed,

warm but not dangerously so. The orange-pink darts, having played

their parts in syllables splashed nearly coherently, are packed away

in a quiver, slung over a shoulder, where they must be content to shiver,

the while uncovering more meaning in phenomena in a cynical age.

I have a fondness for them and they know I Iike to slow and

close my eyes and make the most of what surrounds me.