Blue That Believes in Nothing

George Bradley

When the gold light rinsed out of the trees,
Heaping the ground with its residue of sun,
He tried to imagine syllables it wished to say.
Black wood of winter stood against the sky,
A brittle confusion, gaggle of branches,
The snarl at the tip of things,
As he struggled to believe a sere sentence,
In the clatter and click of dry objects,
The patient whispering in the soil.
An obliterating whiteness casually came down,
And he hoped its soft insinuation, flake on flake,
Might speak for him the shibboleth of this world.
But the place he heard never sounded like his own,
Its tongue a dialect he never learned,
Its idiom an alien understanding;
Again and again
The blue that believes in nothing
Pronounced those strange and barbarous words:
Freedom, it said, release, decay.
Leaf and tree and stone.
Earth. Water. Air.