Dear blue, cool to my eye,
painting the sky:
You make me want to fly
in a Boeing 747 across the big blue
ocean to Sverige with the yellow cross
piercing through flying, waving blue.
My first car was blue. At 16, I
prophesied I’d have a blue car,
and that it’d be, instead of a Plymouth Horizon,
the type that Dad had bought Liana and Justin,
a Dodge Omni.
(O, yes, I had to be different.)
And I suppose I have to be
different in having you as my favorite color.
Stereotypically, you are for boys – for men,
and I can’t figure out why it’s that way anymore
than I can figure out what is a man, who maybe
really is rather like the sky,
which to me seems soft, and is always
a welcome sight signifying the warmth of the sun,
and yet is a clear and vast protection from
getting burned.
You are the cool that keeps me from
overheating, and getting burned.
And I must confess
that the shallow reason I wanted
to teach at the school I’m at is because
of you, blue. My every working day
is filled with you:
Mustang (Carolina) blue.
O, blue, the color of my life,
the apple of my eye:
I want to fly
up to the sky, surround
myself in you, and
pierce through, cut out a piece of blue.
The writing challenge from Teach Write for the month of February is to write a love note everyday to something we love. I may not write a love note everyday, but I may try to write a love note in the form of a poem once a week.
Teach Write is a community of writers who teach and practice writing in order to become better teachers of writers. If you’d like a community to support you in your writing journey, whether you’re a teacher or not, I recommend the Time To Write workshop, or any other workshop offered through Teach Write.
Sara Oyela 