A square of sunlight slowly passes
across the studio floor. I envy its patience.
—Derek Walcott, White Egrets #19
Walcott, what I feel from my own square of sunlight
Is not patient but inexorable. What moves
May move slowly, but never does what patience asks:
To wait. Forward only, a gentle unanswerable might.
And if what weaves from celestial loom is eternal
It is fleeting. She never spins the same way twice.
Cannot be pushed nor pleaded. The only thing
For those like us is indeed our patience, that vernal
Pool, capricious, not knowing the hour of its return,
Gambling in trust of faithful waters, a wager it will rise
Again one day when snow and spring rains burn
Away dry stasis, when poor painter tries again to learn
To pick up brush and with the claw that once held
Only sorrow, hopeless to arrest the weaver’s flight,
To try again, to try again, to try again
To turn back sorrow into its native light.