Yellow Light

Drab sunsets with rain drawn through;
cold cloud in the west thickening the air;
opaque and tobacco-hazed, reluctant light.

Yellow flowers of field and heath:
buttercup, dandelion, tormentil, asphodel;
leaves, falling and fallen, birch and alder;
sedge grass at this year’s end.

Or the dark city streets where sodium beams
arc across and traffic lights turn, as always,
toward caution; no-one is left out here
in the dead, bloated midnight, awaiting burial
in the scabrous dark; a bloom of decay
sucks at the streetlamps’ fleshless yellow,
dry and toneless;

Yes, yellow is the coward colour, the hepatic hue
of failing health, the same light reflected
in the merlin’s eye, a golden glint, ancient hunger
devouring flesh and heart in one raptorous swoop.

Among the standing trees at that long road’s end,
sandstone pillars surround a doorway whose
cathedral studs map avenues for the faithful
and the faithless, leading them into hallowed halls,
to God, places of commerce or the worship of all things

Stone absorbs light and reflects sun-glare as if
it was also gold trapped in the compressed grain,
or a pale essence released from some sepulchre
to lend its colour to the stars in the East and
all the stars before us, leading on to glory.

This spectrum pulses at 580 nanometres,
names segments of light where day rests easy;
the same pulse fades, discolours the paper
on which the histories of such days are written,
mellows the surface white with time passing,
lays moss on the boles of trees, lichen on the rock,
and, finally in the settling, twiilights brightness
to dimness, rises a moon full and true
in its ivory bones.

Where sleep comes in the hollow places,
water sounds; hidden by amber stems, it slides
into the darkness after moonset and still the same
yellow goes saffron to bed; sand-grit eyes, sleep,
the day’s last spark spikes the retina;
our fingers rub away exhaustion.

And the endmost light is warm, the shade of subdued fire,
the gentle flame’s last cooling flicker moves idly,
across the old wood, burning, blurring the edges
as they are consumed.

© BH, 2017

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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.

I wrote Viridians, twenty-nine years later, about a different colour, and condemned the human condition to a solipsistic voyage of self-immolation. What's the difference, I wondered?

I thought I might continue the colour theme but the format was creaking. In the end, what I wrote distilled into this, more reflective poem of passing images. Maybe it was just time to stop going on about it all.

Yes, reflective, that’s yellow for you. 580 nanometres, by the way…