Recovery.

Your world shrinks.
You have no thought of death,
although it breathes on you fiercely.
Pain fills the morphine bubble
in which you float in strange detachment
on the edge of alternative consciousness.
It consumes you.
Nothing else.
Just pain.

Then comes despair.
That night when she bends to kiss you,
turns and walks out the door
you are alone in darkness that is absolute.
Is it morphine that drifts your mind?
You are who-knows-where, far, far from your body,
that tubed, monitored, wounded thing
lying stiffly on a bed that is not yours.
You feel too alert for morphine's dulled half life.
Somewhere in the darkness
comes a connection so strong it surges through you,
an awareness of a much greater consciousness
to which your small life is somehow connected.
Despair lifts. There is hope and peace.
The darkness comes again
but it is not unconsciousness
or the numbness of morphine
but the blessedness of sleep.

You wake.
There is a small window.
In it the leaves of a tree are swaying in breeze
and glittering with light.
Have you never seen this before?
How have you missed this window,
this play of light, these bursts of colour?
Have you been blind?
How could you have taken this for granted?
This picture framed by the small window,
is beyond beautiful.
It is miraculous.

Finally, she takes you out, down the corridor,
opening the door, holding your elbow
and you limp out into the world.
Is this rebirth? Everything is new.
That blue of sky.
Those wisps of cloud.
The beauty of those trees.
And down there, at the end of the street,
is Constitution Dock and the Derwent,
light and water combining in sparkling dance,
surge of boats, white sails filling with wind,
gulls rising, floating, raucously begging,
noise of children, crowds of people,
the old sandstone buildings lining the dock,
all colour, light and movement.
The beauty shakes and overwhelms you.
It shouts its glory. It waves its wonder.
You grasp her hand. You stand in awed silence.

Your eyes will never be the same again.
You feel you have seen into the sacred,
grasped at the miracle of life.
Both for the moment are yours to embrace again

for you, who have been in darkness,
have now come out again into the light.