SHADES OF GREEN

SHADES OF GREEN   Far past my spring green age I sit, all autumn touched with frost, in introspective summer sun and contemplate the lines and limits of this limp and languorous life.   Above and beyond, the marbled sky, creamy clouds skilfully stitched by sedulous swifts into the clear cerulean blue, to patch and paste a quilted backdrop for my bordering bank of trees.   Such trees! Such leaves! Such showers, shoots and sprays and clamouring cascades in myriad shades of green:   Here at the very twig tip the freshest of spring green brings to my musings small fingers shyly seeking in the spring meadows for the timorous hand-holds of new sweethearts and soft lips barely brushed – first steps in a dewy-eyed dance of love.   Further back, a deeper green, so like the fiddle-head ferns on mountain fells and bracken fronds bent and broken flat for comfort in passion’s pas de deux or deeper still to bring to mind the glass of quarry pools and strings of weed a-cling to strands of slick and sodden hair.   Emerald leaves spark a memory of firefly nights tucked tight together with Terpsichore: a passionate prelude to a closer dance. Higher, in the conifers, blue-green needles dusted with a hazy hint of smoke take me to the sea and secret sandy dunes and languid cherished shoreline loves   So many greens, from mint to sage, and clever besides to pick each time the perfect foil for blood berries and pastel blooms and even in the passing time, the fall, the beauty shifts from gold to flame - though sad to say these painted shrouds will duly die discarded on the ground   And so I sit replete, content with visions I could not invent: to soothe my soul and please my eye these shades of green will ever satisfy.      

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I'd just learned that I have myeloma [a bone marrow cancer]. Luckily I have the 'indolent' type -though I didn't learn that until a few months of testing later. Call me "lazybones!" So after a short 'sorry-for-myself' day of wallowing I made myself look outwards at the myriad greens of the trees which enclose my garden. And wrote this.