Homesick

Carol Ann Duffy

When we love, when we tell ourselves we do, we are pining for first love, somewhen, before we thought of wanting it. When we rearrange the room we end up living in, we are looking for first light, the arrangement of light, that time, before we knew to call it light.

Or talk of music, when we say we cannot talk of it, but play again C major, A flat minor, we are straining for first sound, what we heard once, then, in lost chords, wordless languages.

What country do we come from? This one? The one where the sun burns when we have night? The one the moon chills; elsewhere, possible?

Why is our love imperfect, music only echo of itself, the light wrong?

We scratch in dust with sticks, dying of homesickness for when, where, what.

Colour Blind

Lemn Sissay

If you can see the sepia in the sun Shades of grey in fading streets The radiating bloodshot in a child’s eye The dark stains on her linen sheets If you can see oil separate on water The turquoise of leaves on trees The reddened flush of your lover’s cheeks The violet peace of calmed seas

If you can see the bluest eye The purple in petals of the rose The blue anger, the venom, of the volcano The creeping orange of the lava flows If you can see the red dust of the famished road The white air tight strike of nike’s sign the skin tone of a Lucien Freud The colours of his frozen subjects in mime

If you can see the white mist of the oasis The red, white and blue that you defended If you can see it all through the blackest pupil The colours stretching the rainbow suspended If you can see the breached blue dusk And the caramel curls in swirls of tea Why do you say you are colour blind when you see me?