GREEN
Mine is a diminishing language. Once universal, so
healthy and happy, I sang in the forests, had many
specialised terms for aspects of leaf that flutter
or cry in the tiniest wind. I gave oxygen, and not
botany classes, which come late to save ecosystems
now. I do my best to instruct, offering pot-plants
as semi-colons that help you to rest in your homes
but where is the weight of my vocabulary? I'm ever
shrinking, slinking away in Brazil, decapitated by
acid in Northern Germany. I am almost a leprechaun
trying to explain how an emerald isle is different
in feel to planet Uranus. Your mythology gone, how
will you cope with dryads in Greece or the outlaws
of Sherwood Forest, which exists only in verdigris
I wish my world was a young girl sick of chlorosis
as conservationists offer fruit, mowers brush hair
Mark Wyatt lives in the UK after teaching in South and South-East Asia and the Middle East. His pattern poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Ambit, Full Bleed, Greyhound Journal, Hyperbolic Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, Osmosis, P.E.N. New Poetry II (Arts Council/Quartet), Sontag Mag, Typo, and elsewhere.
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