Seven Scraps of Sunlight
By Gregg Kleiner
Below her apartment window,
the woman stands alone in the fragile light of dawn,
waiting for the monks – shrouded in saffron – to emerge
from the mist that settles this time of year
along the river flowing through her village.
She knows she will see their black bowls first,
then their bare feet and ankles,
then the golden yellow of their fluttering robes.
It’s her birthday today and she rose early to offer alms
the way she does every year on this November day.
She stands in the mouth of her alley, waiting,
the steamed sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves
is as warm against her palms
as the flesh of her children still sleeping upstairs.
She has enough to eat, enough to feed her family,
enough to share.
But she has heard stories about places where they don’t,
nations with refrigerators and wide highways and
children who wander homeless and hungry.
She sees them now, and smiles,
seven scraps of sunlight blooming out of the fog,
their robes rippling golden,
their bowls black as olives.
After they have accepted her curry and rice,
chanted in Sanskrit, and dissolved again,
she stands for a long time in the soft white
until the sun begins to burn through to blue above,
and from the wood-framed window overhead she hears her youngest,
awake now beneath the mosquito net,
beginning to whimper.