THEORY OF LIGHT

Andy goes craving all over the beach

with her red grip and her red grapple.

A red apple after dark isn’t red,

it’s a black apple.

She says she’ll black up if she doesn’t have salt.

She finds a sea urchin full of holes.

What’s a blue sea after dark?

Are these the spaces where breath goes?

I find a gorgeous gold-yellow branch,

a colour, a describable friend.

We carry our findings, our branches

and urchins, from end to end.

The blue and red and yellow everywhere

is our theory of colour, of light.

Young salt-footed fools, you know there are no ends,

only ends in sight.

Joan Fleming is a Wellington-based poet at the moment who usually lives in Golden Bay. Her work has appeared in Sport, Hue & Cry, Turbine, Moving Worlds, Takahe, and, The Lumiere Reader. Joan completed her MA in Creative Writing through the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2007; she received the Biggs Poetry Prize and co-edited Turbine that year.

The Theory of Light originally appeared on The Best NZ Poems 2008, you can read about how it came to be here and listen to Joan read it here, which I reccomend because it has such lovely sounds in it. Joan's first collection of poetry will be published later this year by VUP, keep an eye out. This poem also made the cut for The Best of Best NZ Poems and I can see why.

For more Tuesday Poems go to the Tuesday Poem hub.