Myra Schneider
Yellow
‘The banana!’ You frown
over the objects on the table.
Then, your face an umber sun,
you lift the waxy crescent.
‘What colour is it?’
A ripe ‘ooh’ of laughter,
hand flying in excitement
to the primrose headscarf that neatly
covers the dent in your skull;
and a waterfall of sounds carries
the rhythms and intonations of speech
though words are washed out.
For three years you’ve filled
time by painting - at first
lone, female figures
with ovals that didn’t join up.
Now men and women dressed
in daffodil and scarlet perambulate
your paper world, and you are learning
to decode a few spoken words.
I didn’t know the you you were
before the haemorrhage in your brain.
‘Occupation: nurse’ is a fact
filed away in a drawer.
Yet within the forest of damage
the essence remains of the you
who cornered beds with wit, wheeled in
kindness on the medicine trolley.
Outside: the mouthings of propoganda;
oil-troubled waters; the bitterness
of bombs. Here the news is:
you’ve read five words.
And now you’re following my lips,
wavering towards the ‘oo’ of blue.
We take up your favourite colour,
chant it till the air around us
is leafed with our voices.
‘Say it alone.’ And you do:
‘Ye-ll-ow.’ The three petals
of sound fill the room.
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