Lent

It can be as simple as this: the sound of someone hoovering
makes you turn around from your desk to look, and there
on your bedroom wall is an impossible sunlit image
you’ve never seen before, in all the twenty years
you’ve lived in this north-facing room, which never sees sunlight
between October and March –

but here are the three crosses of the window’s glazing bars,
held inside a shimmering triptych, offering you their shadows
and the shadows of branches from the tree in your garden
flailing with a frantic energy you know only too well
from your own inner weather, all projected on to a wall
this February morning of gales.

Dashing to the window, you’re dazzled by
the glare from another, among the jumble of buildings
on the new housing estate below: it’s the top window
of an off-white rendered apartment block,
and it’s a heliograph relaying unseasonal sunlight
into your unlit room.

You’ve barely had time to clock all this when the sun disappears
and you’re left staring at the wall, willing the light
to come back, but these things cannot – must not – be summoned,
so there’s only that watercolour of sheep in a field,
the sketch in oils of a shaded path, and this pencil drawing
of a heron, waiting.