Today I took the bus home instead of walking. The bus ride didn’t last that long, so much so, that I did not press the stop button on time, and I missed my station. Instead, I had to climb up the street to get home. Now on my ascend up the steep asphalt, I ruminated on the idea of writing you a poem. You, the reader, and not just any reader. You are a reader who has lost his sight when he walked out of his mother womb, all his memories are of red walls and blank, endless vistas. But you did not give up the hope for life, and this is evident in the fact that at this moment you are also climbing the stairs to get to room no.715 to attend the anthropology class. I am sitting in front of you in the library and you asked for my help to put paper, thick especially for Braille prints, in the big printing machine. Now I thought of you as I climbed the steep street to get home after I missed my stop on a Wednesday afternoon. I remembered you because I saw a beautiful flower. It is a tiny blue flower. The shade of blue is beautiful. The same blue is that of the easter sky after the sun has set. At the end of the horizon, not quite dark, but close to indigo, a bit lighter. And these scattered tiny flowers hinge on a bed of bright green greenery. The contrast attracted my attention and I thought I would like to write you a poem and tell you of this beautiful flower that you cannot and will not see.
I am sorry.
Not quite Blue
bright, fading blue against bright green:
what can this be?
a flag of a distant nation that I have never been to
an early childhood dream that my therapist could not explain
or is it a canvas in a modern museum near a river, so calm?
It is rather a tiny, fragile flower
of five petals simple and quite plain
floating on the green surface of a bush
near the street on a Wednesday afternoon.
AICHA BINT YUSIF 