Talking Colours

Written by Touria Nakkouch

Brueghel's Women

Walled in

Between the sturdy builds

Of the red tavern,

The silent bells of the little church

And the white, icy summit beyond

We sat,

Eerie phantoms,

Poking our little, flameless fire;

While the skaters' skates

Brush the frozen surface

With little fans of silver,

And the returning hunters

With their four-legged companions

Pass indifferently by, under the hungry,

Approving gaze of the crows above.

We thought:

Couldn't Brueghel have found us

A better place under the sun?

Order - harmony - gravitation.

The dying colours of a rainbow

Darkening into scarlet

In the gushing mouth of the oriental sunset;

The fluid murmurs of a large blue

Pulling strings between sky and earth,

And, in a fluid fusion of eternity and the moment,

Rehearsing the airs of an ancestral chant;

Out there, on the desert landscape,

The crimson buds of a brown turf

Gently leaning out of the frame.

Light - light - a profusion of life.

By a sudden clash of the elements,

Some violation of the gravity law,

Some phenomenal crash-

Death by fire or death by water-

The Garden is many: a whole reality refracted:

Heat, water, and sand are rent open

In a mosaic of bright dissolution;

Cut piecemeal,

Little cubes protruding through stained glass.

The way up and the way down become the same;

Nothing remains

Only light, colour, and a fizzy assortment

Of drunken matter.

©Touria Nakkouch