Viridians

Green: grass and leaf before winter, blue contained by yellow, the eyes’ jealousy;

Somewhere the colour of heaven gave way to shades of envy,
and the sea refracted its passing over sand and shadowed shallows;
currents drew aside the mermaids’ hair in the rip tide’s rolling.

Green: copper’s rust, novitiate’s hue, the visible spectrum around 540 nanometres;

I was only bound for glory, ship-bound, and the emerald sea swayed
like grass till I was ship-wrecked, cast ashore on tide-scoured boulders
for the sun to kiss and wake me in some other land.

Green: shades of nature, chlorophyll or paradise, an illusory colour in the iris;

Where I sailed in dream or different vessels, I found the imagined countries
of the vision I sought; and was that joy of travel or journey’s end?

Green: the starboard gleam, robes of prophet and priest, the colour of absinthe;

I laboured at the windlass too long, drunk too deep of feverish liquors,
pale and musky wines, until the essence of going was an alien thing and I,
faceless at the helm, steered myself to nowhere until the wind itself
heeled me over, pitched me, bleak and night-bound on this sand-locked bay.

Green: affirmation’s light, for going, forbidden, faithlessness love, deceit itself;

Eyes betrayed me, my eyes; all the eyes across the oceans of the world
betrayed their colour in colourless dark; all seeing was confused by shades
of weather, its demons and monstrous mythology; bewildered and poisoned
by concoctions, cast away, I fed my wild and ravening desires.

Green: the colour of our money, sickness on the lips and of the heart, poisons; 

I toasted beauty and St Elmo’s fire, watched the masthead reel,
as if it, not I, was too intoxicated with the need of seeing,
and let the nine winds of winter drive me, or the hundred zephyrs
of squandered summer lull me into faithless sleep.

Green: precious stones and gems, dragon-skin, my cup of wormwood 

So I conquered the waters in which I wallowed, thinking it was my artfulness
made the seas and seasons run; before my bevelled hull, I was master
of their flight but my own folly hid the rocks and races that dragged me down,
shed my barnacled skin and me within, exhausted, scarred and hollow
on the boulder beach with the sea-moss and the wrack
dizzying my green-reflecting eyes.

© BH, 2017/2020

---

I wrote the poem Pigment about the colour blue and humanity’s inability to deal with the universe, our eternal quest to understand it and our tragic failure ultimately finding refuge in didacticism and drink.

This, twenty-nine years later, is about a different colour, and yet it seems to condemn the human condition to a solipsistic voyage of self-immolation. What's the difference, I wonder?

Hmmm.

I wrote a third, Yellow Light, in November 2017. The format was evolving, let's say, but I made it. There may be yet more. After all there are millions of colours, I'm told.

NB.
The image is a combination of two I took at Gill Russell's 'Solus' exhibition in The Watermill in Aberfeldy with added ocean and yacht.

Also the text of this has been edited (mainly to fit a 35-line requirement for a competition submission. I edited it very slightly otherwise. Cut about 11 words and got it to 33 lines.