Q & A

What colour's your poem? she asked.

I said,

mostly blues and greens, some yellow, some red.

Like twilight - maybe a shade of lilac –

some of it fluorescent, some grey and drab

and some parts dissolved small town mud track,

silvered power cuts with a few dabs

of starshine.  Lost fishhooks on dry riverbeds,

waving heat haze and groundnut pyramids.

Some lines white, some unavoidably black.

What colour is your poetry? 

I replied,

some quite see-through, like rainfall on the wide

lit savannahs, on which the long grass feeds

and grows its shadow, neat corn-rowed mornings,

windows missing louvres of glass. Low-speed

smiles, bright swimsuits flashing in the hot springs

in deep forest. The negative space between

points of bison horns, the dragon fly sheen

of streams. And some as opaque as safekeeping.