National Poetry Month: Seven Scraps of Sunlight by Gregg Kleiner

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.