Tainted waters

This poem was inspired by this post.

--

What does the mind do when it doesn't think?
What do colours do when they don't show?
Do they sulk in the shadows and fade in hue
Or do they dissolve and simply colourless go?

What of their individual shades and the soul?
When they leave, what is it that they leave?
Do they pop out of existence like old black holes?
Do they die because they lived and just cease to be?

Do they have memories like the sleeping mind?
Does a colour dream during its sojourn on my wall?
When the paint sweats and greens and reds criss-cross,
Will their moods kiss, vessels list and let droplets fall?

Will molecules entwine and bonds be joined
In the space between spaces, within and without time?
With father-given free-will think with digits
Delving into the future with a pulse, quartz clock chime?

Where do colours come from—a place called home?

Do they drip off unseen from Nordic stalactites,
And collect in century-old pools of light that the Sun
Awakens as blue and green-hued sky in the winter
Before they are swept by melting snow and start to run?

Are they conceived in the vortexes beneath sand pits
In the Sahara, in the shadows of Arbre du Tenere?
Or are they voices of the sand-bearing charred winds
Where the bristling rumours of death and thirst lay?

When the burgeoning oceans and rivers flood over
And devour the shores of my childhood's plain,
When they seep silently under the farmlands' feet,
Will they awaken colours that were long since slain?

Whence come the blue, the pink and the amaranth,
and the auburn and arsenic, the ao and aureolin?
Are they the residue of conflicts, the sweat of creation,
Or simply from whim whence the jonquil and icterine?

The wold is coloured with men who stole its roots;
The moon's argent a reminder of morn's aging sheen,
Usurped and tainted, they roam homeless, aimless,
Yet as colours they came, but as dyes have been seen.

Sans protest upon nature's command did they predate
The dawn of civilization, and with such stillness did they
Succumb to the tyranny of the eye, pushed to scatter,
And now of their origins, I know not what to say.