Earth o’ mine green red brown and blue,
They ask me which colour you are
And laugh when I cannot answer.
Could I lie you were one all through?
But from your green sparkles the rose,
That coy inveterate dancer;
And the blue cusp of the sky, true
To its word, thaws to white, then brown
Gasps out a purple cloud-prancer
That’s carrement inattendu
By the sky’s choleric orange
In the arms of its cloud-lancer.
Earth o’ mine green red brown and blue,
They ask me which colour you are
And laugh when I cannot answer.
Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, a teacher of French as a foreign language and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Wellington Street Review, Black Bough, Nine Muses, Borrowed Solace, Ligeia, Cordite Poetry, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.
