Anxiety in Mosaic

SINCE GREEN BECAME MY FAVOURITE COLOUR

6 SINCE GREEN BECAME MY FAVOURITE COLOUR Since green became my favourite colour And greed smacked of their favourite odour My heart has made the acquaintance Of rubber plantations, which, for nothing but a farthing Did belabour my father’s hands And out of which was made The tyres of the car that leaves – on the asphalt, A millipede squashed to pulp Since green became my favourite colour And greed smacked of their favourite odour Midnight has tabled – a thousand times before my ears – The chirped-out grievances of discontented cicadas My heart has made the acquaintance Of rubber plantations, which, for nothing but a white franc Did belabour my mother’s hands And out of which was made The old pair of Wellington boots that now remind me Of blind wayfaring long ago And the crunch of a horned beetle underneath its soles Since green became my favourite colour And greed smacked of their favourite odour I’ve made out, from afar, The slaughter of obeches* in the keen snarl of chainsaws Spilling – on leaves and blades of grass – Sawdust blood of cream white hue Since green became my favourite colour… 7 * kind of tropical hardwood tree used in making furniture LITTLE YEVGENY Upon viewing a TV documentary on Chernobyl and its likes. The very likelihood of their recurrence. Of sorrow, once, I died For little Yevgeny Born into ‘ego-lunacy’; One more son Of that soil, watered By hemlock rivers On pity, once, I surfeited Dying For little Yevgeny, walking-a-wobble His wasteland home of corrosive breezes Rather the sordidness I see here; This indigence in my blood of ebony Than a life like little Yevgeny’s For a blond hair’d lad, once, I died For little Yevgeny, his summers Made of cyanide noons; the tender-marrowed prey Of mutant potatoes from that subterranean lair Of arsenic peat; ratsbane-tubers For Slavic mandibles; vampire-staple Chewing to chaff His toddler’s brain Tell me, how many penultimate Armaggedons – ...