"Quand un homme meurt
il doit rendre son alphabet . . . ."
- Bernard Noël: Portrait

See now how the sea is not blue
low sky never an exact shade of grey
these misconceptions have always
been with me as I was taught them -

the colour of my file is red
it holds the geographies of my death
not tomorrow, perhaps, but a soon day
maps of bone, a border not what it was

here is the site of ambush, a dark spit
knifing spinewards through reefs of rib
it puzzles them, the cosmonauts, circling
the diminishing globe of what I am, or was

they're eager for more images
they lust for certainty, but for whose sake?
I would rather not know what's
there, nor learn of its savage inhabitants -

Taught that the sea was blue
and bad weather ran to patchy grey
this black-and-white intrusiveness
shakes me, that I am reduced to this.

Fred Johnston’s most recent collection of poetry is Alligator Days (Revival Press). He is a recent recipient of the Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship bursary