Tuesday Poem: Sonnet

Sonnet

These grey days, I hunger for colour. I scavenge
in produce aisles, take home bags overflowing
with orange-skinned mandarins, broccoli, dark
as pines, purple grapes, tri-coloured capsicums.

I sip herbal tea and read your messages.
Mongolia’s as hot as Korea, you say, but drier,
Everywhere is dusty. The vegetable soup is greasy
with mutton fat, and not much fibre in it.

You will pass through Osaka on your way home,
visit temples with gardens of pebbles
and carefully-raked sand. By the time you return
the maples in our garden will be swelling with new buds.

The Japanese have a special name for it.
Shinryoku – the tender new green of spring

- Catherine Fitchett

(first published in The Chook Book - Free Range Organic Poetry

I have published this poem on the blog before, but it seemed ideal to go with the photograph above. I am posting a photograph a day during October.(Missed yesterday - oops!). The trees around the corner from my work are suddenly bursting with tender green shoots and they put me in mind of this poem written one winter when my daughter was just finishing a couple of years teaching English in South Korea.

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