Morphochromatic

Words by Charlie Shirreffs (they/them)

How do you want something you have no name for?  I think of the Greeks and their wine-dark sea,  

distinguished from the metal of the sky  

but the word for their similarity a thousand years away.  I think of kikorangi, blue-sky, and māwhero, white-red,  one colour extant in the land of the long cloud and the other  lying dormant, the tongue wanting not for the  

shape but the intent. The name for the  

colour between blue and black, which we stole  

like stowaways from seafaring and have yet to  

return. Pink and purple and orange  

are of the seventh class of colour morphemes,  

laying stranger in the mind and the mouth than their primary sisters;  how would it feel to watch a sunset without the  

words for what it makes of the sky?  

To see you for the first time in a year and realise I still  puzzle over how to describe the  

colour of your eyes? Or must desire be  

named, articulated – is it not enough  

to understand?