“What colour were his eyes?”

“The colour of the sun, the colour of the sea, the colour of a flower, the colour of the mountains, the colour of the night.”

–Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man


HIS COLOURS WERE OCTARINE

My professors, fresh from excavations
of vellum, paper, and parchment,
point to the past as a foreign country;
they remind me of my right (and, some say, my duty)
to undertake an expedition into ossified glory.

Yet I hold fast to the promise of a world to come

and when my classmates return to regale me
with stories of angels and saints,
I will mince no truths to tell them
that I have met a man of mortal flesh
and that his eyes are octarine.