I like the use of 'staircase' as verb, Martin. I thought the finality of the
rhythm of the last line effective too. 'So many words for so many colours':
apparently we know the words the Ancient Greeks used for colours but not
with certainty to what colours they referred. I like to ask myself what
colour is the sea? For children it always blue but ...
I've sometimes seen it claimed that women have (on average) a keener sense
of colours than men - the argument runs that it is a consequence of descent
from countless generations sorters and selectors of plants, herbs and
flowers. I don't know if that is true, it may be a matter of cultural rather
than biological heritage, but do know in my own experience that women tend
to employ a more discriminating vocabulary of colours that males.
On 26/03/2008, Martin Dolan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Early autumn slants an afternoon
> of liquid light across the trees,
> jade, olive, lime and emerald:
> So few words for so many greens.
>
> They sway up hills to where sky starts
> in stone-wash blue then reaches out,
> stretches on its straining tiptoes
> into vertiginous azure.
>
> Scuffed sandshoe white of cumulus,
> blurred steel of storm clouds staircase up
> to the darkest point of the sky.
> Northward it's raining sheets of grey.
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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