The roof will never fall in

The Beginning
Roman glass, Housesteads

Suddenly she saw the size of the world.
Nothing was the way she had expected
things were fuller than she had thought

and more colourful, by looking through
the glass that had found her she saw
the inside of shells; what moved through it

was form and utterly itself and all
the while a rainbow of possibilities
blown into life and lost and found again

after the ages had painted their mother-
of-pearl across it, ever so fragile
and it lay there, just like that, in her hand.