Little Red Sapling (Poem)

The inspiration for my poem, taken on The University of Exeter's Streatham Campus

How do you cling to beauty,

When the rain tries to 

Wash it out of you?

   

Sometimes it seeks to drown, too,

Salted tears will tear down from

The sky that does not want you. 

You red is too foreign here -

It has no place among the throng

Of earthen autumn eyes.

Those bodies stood like sentinels.

A uniformity disturbed

By tinted rose acrylic. 

They save this for the fallen -

The sleeves they shed when 

White winds turn, which no

Life spring can save.  

You mock their mourning

In your technicolor coat. 

You place it too high and desert

The ground soil for the sky. 

You are wings with no 

Body to hold. 

To them you are a sapling,

And they weave you a crown

From dried daises - 

Deriding your difference.

In this chain of choked dreams, 

They make you a pariah.

You and your sordid religion. 

Yet no crown hides the 

Crimson coat. 

You haunt

         and hurt

      and never hide

                         in heretic hues.

They cannot wash it out of you,

Who clings to beauty. The sky 

cannot drown out your skin.