Light

LIGHT

 

 

Sometimes it’s not about delays and cancellations;

the door that needs repaired, the shopping left behind.

You come home early and find yourself alone:

the sun blooms pink against the kitchen window,

and there’s the whisper of a butterfly against the glass.

 

You slip inside a place where hurry doesn’t happen,

and stand there, listening,

as raindrops glisten all the way along the sill.

 

You scrape a chair back, sit down softly

as though you were in church, your hand across the table.

For in your mind you’re back in childhood –

the film of it is faded in your eyes and yet it’s there.

 

And everything you have to do and have to be

seems suddenly to matter less than what the robin sings

this April evening as the sun comes glinting here and there

about the house. For all these little things

are fragments of the light that make up life.

 

 

 

 

This poem will appear in Kenneth Steven's newest collection,

Letting in the Light, to be published by SPCK in London later this month