Retina

Human eyes see as in the beginning;
Since the dawn of cells, all change,
If change it were, was in the mind
Light interpreted as it falls
Shadow’s darkness guessed at.

Green became the colour of place
Canopy, valley, grassland, pasture,
And blue, the sky, except when cloud
Held it down, neutral and grey.
Brown and black made the ground,
Heath and tree bark, the soil beneath.

Across it, yellowing grass, yellowest broom,
White birds flocking against the hills
Upslope, the dun deer rising,
Sheep and goats, specks in the hollows.

Above, a spectral sun setting,
Its red light on the crags,
Low mist, orange, on the horizon
Foxglove spikes bow slightly,
Accepting dusk in the evening wind,
Pink to white, highlights of fading colour
Before the stars gather night around them.

Before today there were eyes to see
The same scattered light rising in the dawn
Now, eyes and sunrise, so little changed
Are darkened by our catastrophe.

We are looking through these eyes;
The same colours spark inside;
Colour is experienced;
Experience changes all of it:

We see the same green as if decay
Has cast its spores on everything;
We see blue and feel cold light and sadness;
Grey clouds have come to be our comfort.

What hills remain, fill the horizon beyond
Our monuments and spires, all the high buildings
In which our works reside, where our eyes wander.
Sunset is a polluted haze, still red,
Like the glare of flames from far-off battlefields
Reflected in high-rise windows as yet unshattered.

A few flowers are nodding in despair,
Weeds of disturbed ground, agreeing to nothing,
Waiting for the cover of darkness where
The stars come to rebuke us for our folly.

Human eyes look at the world, themselves unchanged;
A world remade by what those eyes once dreamed
Light falls, however, on wise and foolish alike.
Eyes still weep; tears blur the colours yet.

© BH, 2016

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The way we see is physiologically the same as our ancestors at the dawn of creation. They saw landscape and vegetation, colour and shape, much as we do now.

What has changed is how our conditioned perceptions spin it for us. We’re now so far removed from nature, so embedded in our urban warrens, that the world inside us has changed. And the world outside with it. Shaped by dreams and visions and all the approximate man-made things we’ve spawned.

We see what we’ve learned to see (read nightfallen, which preceded this). The rest is invisible.