Anniversary Poem

Home to Oregon
upon arriving in America with my adopted children, after a year in their country


It might be all a dream but the color has changed.


In Africa, our eyes were filled with gold.
The sky was so blue, that the light was sharp gold.
The dirt was so red, it was infused with sticky gold.
Hot green growth everywhere, bursting with the brightness of gold.
Our eyes half-lidded, our movements slow and languid, our skin damp.

Finally: we spent days in the sky, in airports, under fake light and above strange clouds.
We step outside; into January, into Oregon.
Our corneas have been exchanged.

Mist tangles the forest of dark evergreen.
The new grass in the pastures is pure gentle green,
Transient ponds in the low places, fog lines the fields, patient sheep in the distance.
The sky is close to us, gray clouds with soft edges
Nudging the river
Tender.

There are hours of highway ahead
we stop at a bird sanctuary.
We put on so many clothes we don't know where our toes or elbows are.
The little one toddles again, hobbled by her boots, fascinated.
"My fingers are paining me!" you cry, shocked.
"That feeling is called 'cold,'" I answer.
You hold your fingers in front of your eyes, examine them carefully.

The ponds are blue, and gray.
The sedge is yellow, and gray.
The sky and the mist and the rain are soft and gray.

We watch ducks: sparkles of teal in their quiet plumage.
You have never seen plain ducks before: "Look, Mama, look!"
We watch the ripples on the water: the color of sleep, of peace.
We blink and blink, expecting ponds the rich color of tea
     watching for a crocodile, a hippo to surface.
The ducks paddle calmly together, bobbins of brown.

Three children: you run and run down the boardwalks, loud and happy
voices claim this new space.
Sedges, grasses, cattails; winter-faded, surrounding us like castle walls.
Pure colors of bark: maps of silver laced with black, brown woven with gray.
Architecture of branches overhead.  "Where are the leaves?"  They are
brown crinkles underfoot.

I thought I had remembered -- this is my home, isn't it? --
But even my memories became sun-drenched, rich oil pastels.
The birches, cottonwood, pond lilies, bulrushes, wrens,
are painted with watercolors on a wet canvas.  My throat does not
remember the cold breath.  You have never felt it.
Regardless, now we will dwell in the land of the watercolor-mist forever.
We must learn.  "Where are the people?" you ask, spinning slowly.



Getting off the plane.
We blink and blink.
We discover that we have new eyes to see with.
The rolling fields of pale green grass,
The rolling mountains of dark green forests,
Soft silver puddles.
I cannot stop looking.

"I am a little American girl now,"
you tell me, definitive.
You know you have finally arrived
Because the colors have changed.