SUNLIGHT

He walks along the canal and stops. The rain has been falling all day, but as he sits on a bench the clouds clear and sunlight illuminates the drops of water drifting down into the meadow. The shades of green range up from blades to leaves and still the illuminated rain sifts through the air.

He closes his eyes to feel the break in the clouds. There’s a way that the sun can seem so ordinary. More commonplace than a tarnished five-cent piece found in the mud. But as he feels it, seated on that bench by the Elwood canal, he becomes aware that there is an incredible explosion (beyond his imagination how vast in intensity and time) and yet he can sit there and feel this burning star rolling with waves of the released energy of the cosmos, furiously ablaze just above his head, gently lapping against his closed eyelids—washing across his cheeks and lips and ears and nose and forehead, as though it were not remarkable.

He is sitting on a park bench by a canal. He opens his eyes and watches those raindrops illuminated by the sunlight as the heavy clouds of an overcast Melbourne day roll over towards a dreary afternoon in winter.