sharon kingston

After the stormy night:
the crack of lightning and
the thunder peals (one bolt fell in my street!)
the cornflowers (or are they bachelor's buttons?) stand,
ragged scraps of sky, in
a shrimp-cocktail glass on
thin green stems with thin
green leaves, so blue, so blue
azure as sky-blue eyes
the cornflowers (I wish
I were wading through a
field where they bloom)
tattered tales of my life.

These leaves are like the last green
in the paint pots—dried up, dull, and rough,
behind the flowered umbels whose blue
is not their own, only mirrored from far away.

In their mirror it is vague and tear-stained,
as if deep down they wished to lose it;
and as with blue writing paper
there is yellow in them, violet and gray;

washed out as on a child’s pinafore,
no longer worn things, which nothing can befall:
how one feels a small life’s shortness.

But suddenly the blue seems to revive
in one of the umbels, and one sees
a touching blue’s rejoicing in green.

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print.

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I replicated the visual idea of a cyanotype by painting and drawing on a cyan blue oil painted base on a linen canvas, here a field of blue wildflowers and some forget me nots from my garden.

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