How the Sun Rose

A middle-of-the-week posting. Very unusual for me these days. BUT this morning, on my way to school, driving over the Salter Bridge which takes me from the south to north end of the city, which crosses a hundred railway tracks - train cars covered with graffiti, clanging and banging, I turned my eyes to the east and there it was, the sky - coral, pink, blue, yellow. "I'll tell you how the sun rose - a ribbon at a time." Thank you, Sky. Thank you, Emily D.," I thought. I wanted to stop mid-bridge and just stare at it, but that would have meant stopping traffic and probably causing an accident or two. All the way to school, I kept my eyes on the sky as it kept changing. The sun rises so quickly. When I arrived, I pulled the camera from my bag and took these pictures. At school, my little group of nine year olds - all new to Canada, new to English, had been painting sunrises and sunsets, jabbering in Punjabi, whispering in Tagalog, laughing hysterically when they tried to teach me words and I had no clue how to approximate their sounds. Their sunsets on the wall and the pictures in my camera were another kind of language. We painted, we talked (English), put words around the room, and then they wrote poetry - very sweet sunrise/sunset poetry. If I had the poems at home, I would post them. But they are at school, on the inner windows of the hallways, a brave attempt to bring the sky inside with us, rather than leaving it at the door each morning when we enter the building.