A LITTLE SUN

When I was let in the hospital,
they informed me of a floor,
three flights of stairs,
two turnings left
and a room number.

In the dark loneliness
that commands a corridor
demanded by steps of stumbling strangers,
the ill, who are not allowed to depart,
find out that they are bound

to a body,
their deaths’ cage,
and watch their visitors from the inside,
with their heedless
eyes of glass.

I trod trudgingly through narrow passageways,
which clumped my steps with other walks of people
who pensively plod, and, as I opened the aimed door,
the wake of darkness from the confined shadows
still slurred my wobbling sight.

It was then that through the window
outpoured the morning,
nimble of light,
and, after recovering from the sun’s stroke,
I saw you, girded in gold, blithely asleep.

I gasped – happiness you only possess
in your unknowing,
and time is the hatchet man of the inert,
as we force our ways down a route
cramped and confused like a locked room.

And the little of sun we ever know only visits us
in discreet doses over a whole lifetime,
though it seems so dense
that we sense it as if it had always seized us
simply seamlessly.