Marty Gervais photo. Click on image to see more of his work.

Monday's Poem Thirty-Three Thousand Shades of Green © John B. Lee for George Whibb an artist friend said this morning there are some thirty-three thousand shades of green— and afterwards I watch the television image of the dome of a midnight mosque in war which seems the sunken tower of a ship lost beneath the aqua filters of a distant sea this doomed green city of Iraq drowned in deep-water dark so weirdly avocado-coloured in this visionary light where cars come eeling out along a street to slip the shaded bottle bubbles like a loss of breath in burning saints or dying sailors saying last farewells from spirit fathoms of their over-heavy selves and birds in flight come swimming on like sudden moths white-mossed and myrtle to the moon as small gay brooches of a running girl's delight they flitter off these branches and are gone to milt the tarnished edges of our sight oh what a verdant batholith is builded there beneath some ancient heaven's unpresumptive blue but now that hour sleeps beyond a ship-wrecked sun as thirty-three thousand greens float up like shoe-stepped grass to catch the after-sap of also-greening stars

John B. Lee has won over 60 prestigious international awards including being the only two-time winner of the People's Poetry Award, and he has been a two-time recipient of The Canadian Literary Award for poetry (CBC radio features). Most recently he received the Eric Hill Award of Excellence in poetry from Qwerty magazine and the University of New Brunswick. He has had three award-winning chapbooks published to date including In a Language with no Word for Horses, (above/ground press); The Echo of Your Words Has Reached Me, (Mekler and Deahl); and An Almost Silent Drumming, (Cranberry Tree Press), a series of poems written while he was a guest of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and which received letters of praise from both Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. The most recent of his over 30 full-length books are: The Hockey Player Sonnets: overtime edition, (Penumbra Press, 2003); Totally Unused Heart, (Black Moss Press, 2003); and In the Terrible Weather of Guns, (Mansfield Press, 2002). Marty Gervais' most recent book is Be Now: New and Selected Poems (Mosaic Press, 2003) More information: John B. Lee Marty Gervais

John B. Lee: "Thirty-Three Thousand Shades of Green" was inspired by a conversation I had with my friend, the visual artist and fellow poet, George Whibb. He told me that there are more shades of green than any other colour. At the time, CNN was broadcasting images of Bagdad under seige at night. The peculiar sea- green night-vision filters made the city appear as if it were being photographed under water. The sub-marine imagery also caught the weirdly blanched white flight of birds flittering in and out of focus. I was keenly aware of the propoganda value of these mostly empty and uneventful images. CNN was making nothing of much and much of nothing. Meanwhile the people of the city suffered both the conflagration and the lie. Children were dying while we made popcorn and listened to the shake-and-bake pundits blather on and on as if there were something glorious and heroic, rather than something sordid and tragic and oleaginous and truly CRUDE.