"Dream With Colours" by Carl Boon

It matters that her eyes were greener

than most of the land

where I grew up. It matters

that she moved toward me,

wanting but not desperate, knowing

of Yeats what I’d forgotten,

immersed in the movement

of the rail car as it moved

through the rocks of County Cork.

The East of my youth forgotten,

the statues and the Wall, she said,

“It’s better here, and blueberries

resist among these rocks.” A gray

station awaited. I could almost see it,

and when we arrived its gray

gave way to bright pink

rhododendron farther out,

where the village began, where

in a dream nights later we made love

after boiling carrots for soup.

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Adroit Journal. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American literature at Dokuz Eylül University.