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Mimi Khalvati

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Evergreen

It was past green fields and pines
the Jews were cattled and the last thing
her witch’s eyes could see - thirteen
million pairs they say - was the green
of the hill turning away like a mother
turning to take her children home.

And I have lived with green in playing-fields,
neighbours’ gardens seeping poison
through the fence: ground-elder flaunting
height and health where colour should have been,
the colours of my childhood, needed more than ever
in a land that has adopted me, that turns me grey

while the dress my mother danced in, golden
polka-dots and flounces, circles on its own,
sad as olde-time vaudeville, and camel, camel -
lilac of the slopes where shepherds’ lives
meet poppy every day, has settled on the leaves
of war, and every leaf has turned.

Even blues are not the same: of tiles,
of domes, of skies too dazed for blue;
or of shadows, mulberry blue, in the room
you entered blinded, learning how to see again
gloom becoming someone dear, a grandmother
who gives you grapes she has quietly washed.

And white, like all the colours of the world
raising home, hazy as the verandahs
you half-remember, is something to avoid
in a land where no one’s hands are clean;
where dust is never sand but more a mirage
no one even yearns for, intent on lawns.

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