Going Into The Yellow Poem by Tim Liardet

When it came to Conrad's map it wasn't the expanses of red
or the areas of green or of orange or purple,
I was going into the yellow. Dead centre.
The commission was clear—to confront a population
of sentenced and resentful men (invisibly roped)
who, as they entered, seemed too lumbering huge
for the space they occupied, and to engage them, and teach
the gentle arts of self-expression, hand to heart,
biro-end to teeth … I felt like a man sent to fix, say,
a ten-by-three mile rupture in the side of the Zambezi dam
with a tube of calk, dental floss, a hammer and nails
and an endless chain of paper bags that filled up and burst;
the thrown-into-the-gap, the heaped, the washed away,
as quickly dissolving sandbags of woeful words.