It all began with a flash of sunlight behind stain glass. I was flying down a hill on my bicycle in the early morning and glanced at the church as I passed it, all slender in the new morning. The sun was rising behind, and in the instant it took me to fly past – hubs whirring, heart pounding – the bright sun threw himself towards me in a flash of rainbow. It all began when that glimpse of eternity rushed down to meet me; when the curse, for one brief lovely second, lifted. And I heard a call from a distant land. Though being mortal, there was nothing much I could do about it, except to ponder it. Such wonderous moments appear rarely in this life, but when they do, we mustn’t forget them. And so, a month later, I did the most logical thing I could think of: I wrote a poem…

Have you known the satisfaction of silence? The quiet

moan of a long drive to work, the pliant

sounds of the sunlight touching leaves, so delicate

and so much like Love – that unknown trait

among us: a people in a land unchartered.

In a land where peace, now departed,

stalks foreign shores and is not found

wherever lies abound.

For our spirits possess a ragged, arbitrary

sort of repose. And yet they float, wary

of the good, old things which used to hold

the world together. But such dreams they sold

for tattered minds and running on many an untried way:

friends of dissonance, strangers to praise.  

Have you been waylaid by heaven in the morning?

The mirth of a thousand souls, eternity calling,

and the stained glass throwing rainbow sunlight

into the world, and there glanced a strange wight

all fiery bright, ages old – and have you ever wondered

what sounds were made when the heavens thundered?   

But in this soiled and harried life

if caught waking from a spell, 

you are rushed back to sleep,

and there, glinting from afar

in that clouded sleep, a star

blinks solitary above the cloud bank.

And like the star, the weary spell seems small yet great.

But ‘tis not so, for beyond the bank      

there sounds the call – ‘Arise, awake!’