Take grey

by Helga Olshvang
translated by Dana Golin

…Take grey, for instance, it is just that—Grey,
not Yeats’ wild swans, or boiled wool, or felt,
while blue is only Blue and not a bruise,
not shaded depths of lakes, nor flights of stairs,
incomparable Black and Yellow have
no metaphors in archives of the jars,
just as they don’t in the oblivious minds
and rambling speech of those prone to compare.
We have forsaken color.

Color has too forsaken us.  Let run
the orange yolk, let streetlights flash their red
and green; the dove’s like any other dove
the flowering bush is nothing but itself;
and in the dark the color will persist
long past the end of vision: in the gleam
of oily puddles, in the mushroom cap’s
laquer-like sheen, in iodine on a scab
over one’s mangled lip, in battered flags ( to indicate defeat of
Reds or Whites—
overexposed, they’re hard to tell apart!)
Their purpose will be spelled out in the press
And celebrated in the ruckus song.