Owen Davis
The Garden
Go out in the garden,
if you will.
And listen.
Not to the birds, no.
But listen.
The colour red
and the colour white
whisper to one another.
The path we take
(because there is
no choice) follows
the course of their voices.
Winds between what
they say.
Oh, our progress cuts
their lovely talking
in two.
But it mends behind us.
And then, blue would
have its day. Not
the blue of a cloudless
sky, but a blue finer
than that. Which teases,
by only sometimes
showing us what it
can do.
The garden is made
of our flesh; it feels
like that.
Is made of our breath,
so that we awaken
and the (blue) scent
of lavender seeps off
our fingers.
It does. If you even
think not, it does.
With all its herbs
crying at dawn,
and its grasses holding,
one for each of us,
a dream we should value
with our lives, the garden
passes above us, like
a strange and lovely cloud.
The sun pauses in its
fortunate shining, and we
(who are not needed
anywhere, truthfully)
are given this place
to drop our poor shadows
down; in reverie, or
(does this word exist
for us?) in passion.
The colour yellow, and the
colour orange. There is
a sleep for them,
as for us.
I could think of dying,
but I won’t.
There’s a kind of sleep
that is furious with tombstones!
And the garden forgets,
forgets itself in the thrush’s
grand evensong.
Page(s) 164-165
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