Categories
The World

Green

Sunlight through leaves.
Viridian.
Glowing with its own strange life.

My mother and grandmother both thought green was an unlucky colour.
My grandmother was a Victorian; was she responding to arsenic in the wallpaper?
Or did it go deeper than that?
Shade of Pan;
Pagan;
Those tough old gods..
Deep in the forest of the soul lurk the demons.
Never wear green, they would say, never have green in the house.

The early American Settlers cut down far more trees than needed
to create space around their fragile homesteads
because they were afraid of the trees;
Outnumbered
Overawed.

Oddly enough, now we have
felled so many trees,
tamed so many rivers,
devoured so many animals,
Conquered nature, it could be said,
banished the unsettling green menace of it,
We have more to fear from it than ever.

We forget that the life blood of the plants runs through our veins too.