When You Look

You have run
to the summit,
hoping to catch the afternoon sun
in between bouts of clouds and rain,

to see the bright Irish green in your back yard,
if only for a moment.

Your chest heaves with age,
and you laugh at the stitch in your side,
knowing pain is often the cost
of beauty,

a cost, happily paid, again and again
for those few bright moments
of perfection
that remind you just how good

God can be,
when we go to the trouble
to look.

About this poem

A couple of weeks ago it was raining, but every now and then, in between the rolls of dark clouds, the sun would break through for a short while, bright and impossibly clear. Twice I ran up the quarry, hoping to capture the sight, only to get rained on and forced back to my house.

The third time was the charm though. I was able to capture this picture, as well as the ones below. None of which I would have seen, had I not been looking. Beauty, in all it’s forms, is like that. What we see, if often what we focus on. Most everyone else I know remembered that day as a day of rain. I remember the sun on the valley, and the wildflowers that poked through the gray slate of the quarry.

Tom