Green
green is circuitous and certainly cubic, and you need ask
only Magritte, Beckett, or Monet for the certitude
that green has nothing to say of flatness, whether
horizontal or vertical or even in planes—nothing at all
as silent as the game of spring hiding behind blue winter
green—playing the complement of magenta and seldom
hiding from sight in trees and sprouts and stems
green—shining as an impulse in the new and yet to become
green—as the élan vital or the end of joy as jealousy
when the green-eyed monster claims its bounty in envy
green invites, cajoles, makes us believe in youth and rebirth
lingers in emerald seas and rivers of regeneration as the god
Osiris bids us to believe; but nothing gold can stay, as Frost
knows and eternity echoes—and nothing green can stay
before the endless fading to gold and eventual decay
in the twilight, in the fall of evening, green is a kiss, a dance
spun by the faeries, who know that, within each shamrock,
is a beating heart of the mystical, the celestial, that blesses
the poet, the bard, with voice and song; green as the holy,
green as everything complex and lovely and nothing sorrowful
— by Christina Murphy
Copyright© 2012, by Christina Murphy. All Rights Reserved
Christina Murphy lives and writes in a 100 year-old Arts and Crafts style house along the Ohio River. She continues to be amazed at how the Arts and Crafts movement — like the painter Piet Mondrian — found such artistic integrity (and solace) in straight lines and simple (yet complex) forms. She tries to emulate the same idea in her poetry. Her poems have appeared in a range of journals and anthologies, including, most recently, PANK, Poetry Quarterly, POOL, Contemporary World Poetry, MUSE, MiPOesias, Blue Fifth Review, and Counterexample Poetics, among others.