“Blue is the closest color to truth.” ~ Steven Tyler
Hello, Friends. Hope you had a good summer!
We’re celebrating Alphabet Soup’s 17th Blogiversary and happy to be back in this space to serve up our usual mischief and merrymaking. 🙂
Are you feeling more hopeful, optimistic and energized about the upcoming election? While I’m mostly thinking about the color 💙 BLUE 💙 these days, Richard Jones’s captivating abecedarian list poem has me considering other colors of the visual spectrum in entirely new ways.
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THE NOMENCLATURE OF COLOR
by Richard Jones
Absinthe green: Laura’s eyes.
Bishop’s purple: Evening skies.
Cornflower blue: Dreams of the wise.
Dragon’s-blood red: My mother’s sighs.
Elephant’s breath: Imagination.
Forget-me-not blue: The dust of cremation.
Guinea green: Ruination.
Hessian brown: The dust of creation.
Iron gray: The paradox of clouds.
Jade green: The bride’s necklace.
Kingfisher blue: Justice and grace.
Lavender gray: A widow’s shroud.
Medici blue: The heart that is jealous.
Nile blue: The color of water.
Onionskin pink: A poem for my daughter.
Pearl gray: The wedding gift.
Quaker drab: The virtue of thrift.
Raw sienna: The dirt that we sift.
Seafoam green: The rowboat adrift.
Tyrian rose: The color of love.
Ultramarine blue: Heaven above.
Venetian pink: Hell below.
Wedgewood blue: The little we know.
Xanthine orange: The taste of life.
Yvette violet: The lips of my wife.
Zinc orange, zinc blue, zinc white: The color of houses in paradise.
~ from Stranger on Earth (Copper Canyon Press, 2018).
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