Millay, Millay,

I saw you clad in your colourless plaid dress,

Ambling about those three islands in a fantastical bay,

The ones you spoke about when poetry found its renascence

Through your hands, which fed elegiac suns

Their share of glint and gold dust.

 

Millay, Millay,

I like to believe that the pigments of your dress escaped,

Only to seep into the roots of freedom and unfiltered moxie,

Roots which bore atop rainbow foothills  

Apples and pears aplenty,

Through summer fever and winter chills.

 

Millay, Millay,

The room is full of you

Vases, roses, sweet foliage-

Your essence lingers in all colours and hues.

You were a woman’s woman, and that of a man too;

Of people who smudge their leaves evermore in blue.

 

Shifa