A small collection of poetry about magic in the everyday
child of the light
Photography literally means 'writing with light'. Frank Lloyd Wright understood this hanging light like pictures on a wall, knowing it to be as important a material as brick and wood. There's a certain beauty to the shimmering of blades of light as it cuts through the dust of a family home; the way it twinkles as it touches the drop of rain and, at just the right angle, blossoms and blooms into all the colours of the world; how it paints the mountains and valleys a smattering of different colours, a different palette every morning; enthralling people by the way the rays filter through the trees and bounce off the waves. Eratosthenes used light to figure out the size of this little ball of earth we stand on. I think often about how each ray of light travelled 8 minutes and 20 seconds, burned its way through the atmosphere, bounced off countless people, houses, trees, just to be stopped by our eyes, unbashed and perfectly content at its destination. Light enchants at every scale it is perceived. The way it dances and shimmers, you would think it had a life of its own. I am a child of the light, striving to live each day with the beauty of the cozy light of a sunset, the confidence of a single photon traveling 100 million miles to its destination. 'Striving' is the keyword. On some days, my eyes get moist, acquiring the same glistening as water droplets falling from the sky. It is on these days that the light is especially beautiful, taking on an almost ephemeral and magical feeling. I borrow strength from the light: a gentleness of the touch, a twinkling of the soul, a lightness of the self. I see the light as beautiful maybe the light will see me as beautiful too.
sun(set/rise)
The shape of the sun is a contour, carved by its intensity, angle and number of people who are awake to see it. In the evening, the sun sets the sky ablaze with the vibrant shades of a ripe peach; a final spectacle. Sunset: a time of day when a significant portion of all people on Earth all glance at the same thing and admire its beauty. A small act of cohesiveness and shared beauty in a world that desperately looks for things to things to glue it back together. At night, a million stars pierce the darkness. A stillness, illuminated by none other than a reflection of the sun. It is not by chance that the first piece of art made by a human in space is of the orbital sunrise. A promise that the day will start anew, a sign that tomorrow exists, that things dormant can wake once again, showing us that something as immovable as the heavens and the cosmos can still change. As the rays peek over the crests of mountains and waves, there is a warmth that wakes the world again.
stargazing
From far away,
it looks like we are huddled close.
A community of stars,
clustered and cozy.
Yet the distance between us
is so vast that
travelling at the speed limit
of the universe
would still take billions of years
to traverse.
People used to tell stories
millennia ago
about how stars are just
holes in the blankets of the sky,
there so the light of day
can peek through at night.
I wish we could pull the blankets closer, to keep us warm.
All we can do is longingly gaze,
watching us each shift red,
hoping that one day our dust will meet.
casual magic
At 1:00, the sun streamed at just the right angle through the patterned glass, splitting the uniform beam of light into a hidden spectrum of fractals, bathing the room in a shower of brilliant colours. The dripping of the water from the faucet was always erratic, never settling on any sort of discernible pattern. Drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip , It was always 8 drips of the faucet before each perennial was well watered. The clouds seemed to agree that today would be a great day to read at sunset. A friend once commented how they found books so weird, you just stared at marked slices of a tree for hours, vividly hallucinating. I joked how the beach matched the cover of my book; they laughed, our bodies bathed in the mellow yellow that seemed to melt the world around us until it was just us, the ocean, and the setting sun. There was a cozy spot to put my head, just below the PULL FOR STOP cord, between the metal frames of the bus windows, enough space for me to have an earbud in. I would spend the 40 minutes bus ride shuffling for new songs, singing under my breath, feeling and voicing the shape of each word, watching the clouds slowly losing their tinges of colour as night fell.