The roof will never fall in

The Beginning

Roman glass, Housesteads

All of a sudden she saw how big the world was.
Nothing was as she had expected,
things were fuller than she thought

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

was form and pure self and all
the while a rainbow of possibilities
blown into life, lost, and found again,

the centuries having painted their mother-
of-pearl across it, ever so fragile –
there it lay, just like that, in her hand.