Anne Scott Musil's "Wakening" begins with a glance out of a window and ends with the same glance, yet the two weather reports mean very different things. In between lies a whole relationship, and the poem never says outright that it is over. The reader has to work that out from a single word in the last stanza: "absence."
The opening is quiet and a little ragged: "it's a stormy day the glimpsed / sun ivory light through / leaden gray." There is no punctuation and no capital letter, so the speaker seems to be thinking aloud, caught mid-observation. The line break after "glimpsed" is well placed. The reader has to hop to the next line to find what was glimpsed, which mimics the way sunlight shows itself briefly and then slips away. The colours are chosen with care. "Leaden" is heavy, almost physical, while "ivory" is pale, soft and slightly antique, like something kept. Even in the first three lines, light is outnumbered by weight.
Then the poem turns to "you," and the memory grows brighter. "It was always your eyes / i thought of," the speaker says, and the eyes are a sky: "sky blue when glad / so sun-filled clear." The little word "so" makes this sound like a rush of feeling rather than a polished description. The eyes also change with mood ("when glad"), which suggests a person closely watched and closely known. The poem leaves open who "you" is. A lover, a friend or a family member would all fit, and the poem is more universal for not choosing.
The third stanza widens the image from sky to whole weather: "you were also the wind / the endless veils / and clarity after / a storm." The "also" matters, because the person is not just the pleasant blue patch but the gusts and the drifting veils too. "Veils" is an interesting word, since it can suggest mist, rain or cloud, but it also hints at something half-hidden. The stanza ends on "clarity after / a storm," where the line break again does the work: "a storm" is left standing alone, as if the calm has to be crossed through weather first. This person did not just bring peace. They were disturbing and clearing at once.
The emotional centre comes in the fourth stanza: "with you I felt - yes, / desperate sometimes / but seen." The dash and the "yes" read like a confession, an admission that the relationship was not simple. The speaker doesn't smooth it over. But the stanza resolves on a single, stark word, "seen." It gently echoes the eyes of the second stanza. The person with the sky-coloured eyes was also the person who looked back, and being looked at is what the speaker misses most. Notice too that the verbs sit in the past ("was," "were," "felt"), so the poem has been quietly building a world that no longer exists.
The final couplet snaps back to the present: "now your absence says / it's gray today." Here the poem does something clever. Absence is given a voice, and what it says is just a weather remark. Nothing is shouted and no grief is named. The first stanza's "leaden gray" returns as plain "gray," and a stormy day, with its drama and its glimpsed sun, has flattened into dull, even cover. The storm, it seems, was at least alive. The title now takes on a double meaning too. The speaker is waking to a morning, and also, it seems, waking to the fact of loss, because the one who used to read the sky for her is gone.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and short, uneven lines, which suits its tone of a half-spoken thought. What holds it together is repetition of imagery: colour, light and weather return from the first line to the last. Its significance lies in that restraint. It turns private loss into the most ordinary small talk, and the ordinariness is what hurts. Anyone who has felt a day change colour because of who was or wasn't in it will recognise the feeling.