Hello Poets -
I'm loving these juicy poems! We live in a colorful world, thank heavens, and these poems celebrate that. Here's one I wrote in half-surprise at my new fondness for orange - a color I'd discounted when growing up as either muddy (like our brownish-orange furniture, so characteristic of the 70's) or else too bubbly or exotic to have anything to do with us. I surprised myself by buying an orange kimono and feeling like a queen in it. Since then, I see orange as a flag of possibilities, of light-heartedness and honest beauty.
Orange
was only a flash among apples
in the kitchen,
not to be eaten but peeled
away
to get at paleness beneath –
was paired in our house with
brown
and dosed with rust
that left it limp
and unprotesting
as the couch it covered –
was, in our steel-grey and
lobster-green lives,
in our brick-red and
hospital-white days,
unthinkable
as an oriole preening on the
mantel,
an incongruity
fanning a brilliant wing at
dusk.
A flirt, a tease, a
light-weight
I thought her –
nothing to do with us.
But last year,
in pumpkins she spoke first,
in maple leaves I heaped on
tables,
in zinnias and lilies,
in monarchs and calendulas,
in new carrots and
nasturtiums:
these were her first words to
me.
And then, in certain songs
and the swirl of silk skirts,
in the flare and heat
that comes of reading some
poems,
in fierceness that puts the
flute
in your hands:
she opened me fully to her
oratory.
And so I wrap myself
in the orange kimono
and wearing it, become queen
of flowers and desire –
her newest friend
and temporary vessel
for the world’s joy
she seeks to inflame. KateSinging