LEAVE TAKE HOW ISLANDS GIVE

                            

            Worth its past in gold, outliers weigh : sand with song
                                         strewn black . chest storm crest
            night fungibles . lime rum | men jerk fish net 
                                                  sun . plus your pirate
            pick of flowers, moons half helming hearts at sea.

            Work folk names gauge love for country God
                                                       and weed . Walk
            good they’ll point on . roads that winding funnel
                                                  cock pit
            stop | conch rest : trees hum 'n' ponder wind strip
                                                       limb start over.

            Virgins greening might blue eye you . wish a wand
            wave would you whirling hems away! lift them . and you.

              Spare notice ‒ back on bounty, in maps faith
              tested ‒ that first pale trader’s lurching print
              to shore : consigned links for you . the miles on you.

                                                                 – W.W.

 

                   

         

 

 

             BLUE GREEN

             To realise the green of green and
         to realise that you love that green more
             than you love the vain idea of your
         lawn or of our universal garden:
             what a fearsome dying beauty, start
         of no nostalgia for some tribal green
            but for the greenless Light never seen
         by green-addicted green-projecting eyes.
            Now your blue awe sprouts tears of the sap
         of adieu veining all greens up to blue:
            feeling and so knowing them are clues
         as to why you could never plant or wave
            flags of green | black | yellow | red | white | blue
         on Earth, on any of her million moons:
            their colours would only pale and fade
         beside the lidless Light which flags conceal
            with their stitched-in labels, tags of fear
                      of both the green of green
                      and green’s hueless haunter,
         fear-names by brick-words with only one mind:
            of hoarding what must be left behind;
        a fear the divorced spouse of your blue awe.
            To compare that fear’s scriptures, pictures
        and airs with the Light they have turned dense-dark
            is to liken morality’s spite
        to Law, or strands of streams to the webbed sea,
            to flatter and flood the ear and eye
        with winds and shades of fat or flat notions
           of green no tree, no Ireland would know.
        But twilight green is an autumn farewell
           by a god fading yet clamouring
        for recognition as fuel for his
           return to the Light beyond all these
        merely green gasps of his witness struck blue
           and drowned by a label-less silence
        no flailing arms of green words can undo.

             (from “Readiness” by Brian Chan)