The Multicultural Poem

for Maria van Daalen & Lorna Crozier

It has to do
        with movement -

How the tongue must change
                  its colour for every language -

little chameleon bruised by your teeth.

                    Pull it out, pull it out, the silence

the silence between
the cadence and the syntax -

In the garden
there are green and orange lights -
There was a life - there is
        a life

filled with cut skin and bruises -
The bruises and the tiger lilies
                        would like to scream.

In my dream, the doctor
walks in with a laser.
...