An Ordinary Day
It is early July and the morning sun
illuminates this page, my coffee cup,
a shiver of glass on my desk
and the hand that holds this pencil.
I am looking down at the street
beyond my window, quiet in its
mid-morning, Wednesday ordinariness,
exercising my words in this simple record.
You know the kind of thing I mean.
I want to evoke the nothing special
of everyday that makes it good to be alive.
I want to find the words to show
the quality of sunlight catching
the leaves on the hedge and shrubs,
the way the wind pushes the scattered clouds.
When I lay my arm across the desk
in this square of yellow light
it warms my skin without burning.
Through the open window I hear
the clatter and whirr
of a hand-pushed mower
a few gardens down the street.
In the pauses I can hear
the hum of traffic from the highway.
A woman and her dog pass and stop to look
at the parallel black lines
and gouged tarmac sliding off the road
into chipped slabs of paving
where yesterday a couple veered
under a lorry while tuning their radio.
I picked this shiver of glass from the sidewalk,
its point far sharper than this pencilīs point will ever be.
Mike
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