Our kids bought us tickets to Melbourne to see the wonderful exhibition of the French Impressionists. While queueing to enter I watched the child in front of us and tried to see the morning through her eyes.

The Impressionists
- a reflection on an exhibition
NGV, July 2004

We queue to be impressed
At first we are not impressed
that it opens half an hour late

this forces us to queue unimpressed
of a Melbourne winter’s morning
until the sun (an emerging poet)

does a good impression of
Paris au printemps and we
are forced to reflect on

and in
the wall of water which could
have been done by Manet

and the impressionable little girl
in the pink parka wide-eyes
the reflections

pressing tentative fingers
and her mother gives her a book
Katie meets the Impressionists

but what impresses this little girl is
shining on a shimmering vertical plane
in this urban winter balm

and what may be the impression
of this day in years to come
will not be pictures in golden ratio frames

but a morning Melbourne sun
quivering on a glass wall
of water.

© rob walker, 2005




Initially published in my first small collection sparrow in an airport in New Poets Ten, Friendly Street/Wakefield Press, march 2005. ISBN 1 86254 670 3
This one also got a guernsey on the Friendly Street Poets website around 2008