sunlight

Sunlight comes quietly, as if hesitant to wake the sleeping room.
It finds the edges, touches softly the curve of the wooden chair,
the corner of the table, tracing gently across an open book
as though reading carefully the words left behind.

You follow it outside as it silently makes it way across the just-waking city,
taking its time to impart its presence on every single leaf, every rushing denizen,
every nook in the ancient marbled buildings.
Giving equally to all under its attention.

There is a kind of seeing that happens,
only when we surrender the heavy architecture of our planning,
our constant looking ahead.

The sunlight has been trying to tell you this for years now,
sliding between curtains you thought were closed,
finding the smallest opening to enter.

What have you missed in your determined forward motion?
The way your child’s face changes when truly listened to,
the subtle shift of seasons in a tree you pass each day,
the stories held in the hands of those who have loved you longest.

You have walked past this doorway a thousand times, unseeing,
until today when some angle of light reminds you,
this is utterly and entirely new and moving

And then, the resilient weed in the corner of the street, unnoticed and abandoned,
suddenly bursts into flames; echoing in a million different shades of green.
The buildings which we think of as static and fixed,
are set aflame and revealed as alive, whispering centuries of accumulated stories

The faces of the passerby’s take on a radiance, as if the penetrating photons
unveil the unspoken joys and tragedies we all carry.

This is how we are healed it intimates,
not in great revelations,
but in small surrenders to attention.

The silence of the sunlight only urges you to notice,
how it travels across the floor of your life,
making visible, what you’ve learned not to see.