The Colour Green

In my green kitchen, beneath a window framed in green voile, sits a green pot plant - my cyclamen. Its leaves are full, and stretching toward the sunshine in the tiny courtyard beyond the glass. Draped extravagantly over the whitewashed courtyard walls is yet more green - laurel, ivy, unidentified climbing plants, courtesy of neighbours' overgrown gardens.

This is my favourite time of day to take in the contrast of those bright walls and abundant shrubbery, when the mid-morning sun comes through the leaves and makes their green all yellow-bright. My white walls are creamy, striped with the shadows of dangling branches, and lately a few pink flowers have appeared in one corner, a teasing splash of lurid colour. My cyclamen presses itself against the kitchen window, as if reaching toward its outdoor cousins. Stripes of sunlight respond, passing through glass and slanting along my walls and countertops, kissing the cyclamen leaves as they go.

Green is the operative colour of the season, exploding in every corner of every garden, in the treetops, from the cracks in pavements. We are through the barren time, and life can no longer be contained but weaves freely around and back into its old familiar haunts. I know no other colour with so many shades, and so much power to evoke the most simple and sincere joy. Brand new green, deep rich green, ever-green, the green of watered lawns, of brookside rushes, of poplar avenues... it's almost too much to take in, this lifeblood colour pulsing through the veins of earth.

The local fields at dawn look like every untouched morning since the world began, their damp grass breathing pale mist. When you stand in them time slows, and all the history they've witnessed comes alive, old as the tree-buds are new.

Welcome, March!
Welcome, sun-blushed sky and pink-tipped hedgerows.
Welcome, baby blue cloud-scudded sky.
Welcome, clear brook, mirror of trees.
I'm so happy I'm here to see you...

I'm out of words, so here's Rossetti, and March's speech from 'The Months: A Pageant'.

***

I blow an arouse
Thro' the world's wide house
To quicken the torpid earth:
Grappling I fling
Each feeble thing,
But bring strong life to the birth.
I wrestle and frown,
And topple down;
I wrench, I rend, I uproot;
Yet the violet
Is born where I set
The sole of my flying foot,
 And in my wake
Frail windflowers quake,
And the catkins promise fruit.
I drive ocean ashore
With rush and roar,
And he cannot say me nay:
My harpstrings all
Are the forests tall
Making music when I play.
And as others perforce,
So I on my course
Run and needs must run,
With sap on the mount
And buds past count
And rivers and clouds and sun,
With seasons and breath
And time and death
And all that has yet begun.

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