How am I? No offence, but frankly, I’m tired.
He’s hunched beside you on the bench, seemingly absorbed 
by gravel, impervious to morning’s lilt 
and the jaunty thrust of the ginger-lily by the wall. 
A young man, wizened from horrors of the homeland 
he’s fled and the perilous boat of his near drowning, his tone 
is merely observational.

If only you could summon for him a glimpse 
of the capricious colour that to sceptics is simply a dull rust 
or perhaps even trumpery, but for believers 
is endowed with a shimmering power to combat bleaks 
of all shades, even if the vagary of its visitation 
remains incomprehensible equally to those privileged 
with certainty on life’s purpose, as to those 
certain only of its potential to annihilate.

Western preoccupation with specifics defies logic. 
These well-meaning check-ups month after month 
to track the geography of my pain, as though a body-part
would offer a peephole into the soul. 
The meticulous sheen of his worn leather shoes, the folded 
handkerchief, are poignant manifests of the meagre pegs 
of habit alone availablefor the framing of his day. 

Yet it’s you chance favours. For when a gallery’s stretch 
of sheer canvas plunges you into startling bleak on the complexity 
of nothingness, there it is, in the very next hall, 
the impish gleam of a lion’s mane that sends you soaring. 
So you take it out into the March morning, this thing you clutch, 
blow it skywards on a wish that a weary young man 
be granted a sighting, if evanescent, of the precious colour.