Remarks on colour

Poem by Jonathan Wooding

for Graham Shaw, author of ‘God in our Hands’

See! Our bio pod, the Earth, compendium of hot colour,
all tricked out in oriflamme, in indigo, in ruby,
its spinach-green grasses, jasper soils, its verdigris,
their slow-burn insouciance, their flair.

Earth’s an ark, naturally, an uncertain
voyager, unseen yet by light from the birth
of time herself, space time’s solar heat
beating up tinctures beyond bleak, within
withering. I am, I am not nothing.

Take, for instance, the yellowhammer – across
our garden a trio, in fact, and one of them
surveilling my surveillance. She’s a big deal,
a sunspent ember of HaShem, no less,
all voltage and calorific Feuerschrack
in earth as it is in kindling. Yea, in
the tint and tarnish of her stillness
God’s invisibility darkens and dyes.

And there, an excoriant camellia discards,
apparently without dilution, flamingo flairs
as if everything were explained.

Nobody knows the colours I’ve seen.

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Comments

another illuminating poem Jonathan . Thank you for writing it .

By Neil M on 29th April 2021 - 11:51

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