Don’t speak to me of sorghum
Red fields, pressed up toward a sky
Whatever called to me there
Too wild, attempting a face
Old verses for my father
Dignify the cooling page
Black earth is the word it makes
Tilts forward, consequential
— Wendy Xu
Like liquid shadows. The ice is thin
Whose mirror smears them as it intercepts
withdrawing colours; and where the crust,
as if a skin livid with tautening scars…
— by Charles Tomlinson
It has been solemn traveling
A night and a day
This road running straightly northwards;
None went my way.
— Rosamund Dargan Thomson
The morning may be brilliant; the season
is one of brilliances—sunlight through
the fountained willow behind us, its splayed
shadow spreading westward, our shadows westward,
irregular across damp grass, the close-set stones.
— Michael Anania
… nothing can
stop the truth of it art is all we
can say to reverse
the chain of events and make a pileup
of passion to match the stars
No choice but between
a certain variation
hard to perceive in a shade of blue
— by William Carlos Williams
Green was the forest drenched
with shadows
the roads were serpentine
A redwood tree stood
alone
with its lean and lit body
unable to follow the
cars that went by with
frenzy
a tree is always an immutable
traveller.
— by Etel Annan
Color is new upon each sunlit surface;
lifting lines are reimbursed with flight;
cool and level lie the planes of morning
covered with light.
— by Edith Henrich
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, Verne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is, and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
— W.B. Yeats
I’ll twine white violets and the myrtle green;
Narcissus will I twine and lilies sheen;
I’ll twine sweet crocus and the hyacinth blue;
And last I twine the rose, love’s token true:
That all may form a wreath of beauty, meet
To deck my Heliodora’s tresses sweet.
— Meleager, ca. 90 BC (Translated from Greek by Goldwin Smith)
One evening in winter
when nothing has been enough,
when the days are too short,
the nights too long
and cheerless, the secret
and docile buds of the apple
blossoms begin their quick
ascent to light. Night
after interminable night
the sugars pucker and swell
into green slips, green
silks. And just as you find
yourself at the end
of winter’s long, cold
rope, the blossoms open
like pink thimbles
and that black dollop
of shine called
bumblebee stumbles in.
— Susan Kelly-Dewitt
Unusual Colors - Digital and AI art 