Hay Fever
'Radiant with disease.'
(Derek Walcott) You come out of the blue, like a seasonal breeze or the roseate flush on the Pieris leaves, as you have done every year since twelve, summer sickness blighting the coumarin days. But thirty years on I can greet you like a friend, a pole I dance around to get my bearings; as the odds grow short against the body's coup, you at least will not outstay your welcome. You bring those blurry days on end with histamine firing its fevered darts, you send a tide of pollen on my eyes on my nose till, in your sudden exponential decline, you give me back the stable world, true colour and smell and, not to be sneezed at, an ash spray stamped on molecular blue.
(Note: coumarin is the sweet odorous principle of new-mown hay.)
Peter Forbes
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