![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hallelujah
Aug. 28th, 2009 08:22 pmToday, the air smelled of autumn. The light is slanting into that pale clear sunlight, the harbinger of chill nights and storms. In between the showers, the wind gusts, driving fresh-fallen brown leaves into the gutter.
It's the first day of school: all the green-uniformed first-years of my old alma mater look so terribly young. I have a tight feeling in my throat and chest, halfway between nostalgia and grief. All this passes. Passes, and diminishes, and becomes nothing more than another evening of another day, and all these bright colours dimmed.
If I were a better poet, I could put into words the things that live wordless, cognisant of beauty: sunset reflected in high windows; the grass so green and thick where in a season it will be sparse and muddy-brown; shuttered blinds full of silences; the wind over the strand from the green-grey sea, thick with brine and fish-rotting harbour fumes, and rocks, black like burnt bone abutting the headland, and the sweep of the reef mirrored under the waves reaching out from the nineteenth-century Martello tower, and the smell of woodsmoke on the seaward breeze.
And I wonder, sometimes, how we can stand to live confined by small and petty dreams when the world is so vast and deep, full of power and wonder. And how I fall short, with words, of what I want to say.
It's so beautiful, tonight, that it hurts.
It's the first day of school: all the green-uniformed first-years of my old alma mater look so terribly young. I have a tight feeling in my throat and chest, halfway between nostalgia and grief. All this passes. Passes, and diminishes, and becomes nothing more than another evening of another day, and all these bright colours dimmed.
If I were a better poet, I could put into words the things that live wordless, cognisant of beauty: sunset reflected in high windows; the grass so green and thick where in a season it will be sparse and muddy-brown; shuttered blinds full of silences; the wind over the strand from the green-grey sea, thick with brine and fish-rotting harbour fumes, and rocks, black like burnt bone abutting the headland, and the sweep of the reef mirrored under the waves reaching out from the nineteenth-century Martello tower, and the smell of woodsmoke on the seaward breeze.
And I wonder, sometimes, how we can stand to live confined by small and petty dreams when the world is so vast and deep, full of power and wonder. And how I fall short, with words, of what I want to say.
It's so beautiful, tonight, that it hurts.
