How will they hear is your concern,
Romans has been asking for years.
My concern is where it grows from and how it grows—
your sculpted maps, lips white with practice.

The Good News. You clean it out from under your fingernails, 
wash your baby of its food art mess before pictures.
Put lined boots on at first frost and walk past the weakest bodies of it.
In your pocket will good turn to grey? If songs become grey and paper fades,
if the maidenhair fern is silenced and in the rainbow you see only grey stripes.

If the vine and cloth age grey and the lettered olive shell clutches 
against a grey riverbank. If you miss the saw whet owl for the greying sky.
If butter yellow husked fields and the Greenbelt become grey
and stories remain only in Northern stone—

how will you hear
if your eyes close down to green leaf, the reddest of red wines, 
the living page, the colours of a hand?

*Reference: Romans 10:14, the Bible.

Fran Westwood is an emerging Canadian poet writing from Toronto. She writes poems that help her pay attention, often on finding belonging and bridges in diverse landscapes.

Fran’s work has been published by Contemporary Verse 2, the Poetry Pub and For Women Who Roar. She has pieces forthcoming in Prairie Fire, Inanna's Canadian Women Studies journal and in a 2021 collection by Flying Ketchup Press.