Poem: Transfiguration

my first published poem, appeared in The Mid-American Review

Transfiguration
Ned Hayes

White men’s bodies turn green under the billows of the sea

I have been told so; when the young are dragged from the tide

their lips have melted into a delicate slash of emerald.

Black bodies turn blue in the brine

none of the longshoremen here notice, there are too many dead;

in Jamaica or Barbados it is rarer. There, the heavy pictish tinge

is obvious — their friends, dark and strangely indigo, found

among the flood of tourist caucasian suicides.

There is a color women’s bodies turn

the change is as oblique as the departure of the soul

when our flesh takes on the scent of waves,

our skin tone melds away.

But no one has ever noticed the change of shade;

these corpses often float for years.

then, sometimes, they return to shore, marry, take up jobs or clean

house, have children, laugh and talk.

I am walking around still, tasting of ocean, undetected.

 

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Poem: Transfiguration was originally published on Ned Hayes