I know it doesn't make sense, but I'm a writer. I deal in things that make no sense.
I was just going upstairs this morning when I saw a flurry of snowflakes outside. So I went outside, in my stocking-feet and my thin clothes and soaked in the cold and the beauty and the poignancy of the light amidst desolation. The wind sang to me, and I lay back in the cold and stared up at the strangely blue sky, with masses of beautiful gray cloud and brilliant sun.
Snowflakes, I fancied, are souls. Each soul whispers down breaths of hope to earth. Oh, it's so beautiful... And it is humiliating and it is juvenile and it is hopeless and it is painful. And it is the exact essence of living. I am not weak for it.
I'm listening to songs from eighth grade- songs I listened to two years ago- because I was such a poetic soul then. I was such a stark nonconformist then. Before I even knew there was such a thing as the Ivy League Crowd and the Grade Slaves and the Everything That Makes Things Not Work.
If only I could capture every one of those uncapturable moments... Like the time, the summer after seventh grade, that I stared out the window in steamy August and heard indescribable music... Or, to speak of summers and music, the summer after eighth grade when I listened to a rare musical instrument play the symphony of life in an empty room... Or that same summer, when I saw a field of violets growing on the floor of a burnt forest, and fields stretching for miles and bright blue water and those beautiful notes...
But it was a lovely dream; that was all it was, and I can retain lessons from it for poetry, but I can't stay in it. Otherwise I would simply drown...
So, here is something that is not a poem but a personal- well, not narrative... not essay...
Here it is. It was for class. It was supposed to be called "Color Your World" because my teacher, I believe, disapproved of imagination.
Ariel
Color Your World
The morning is orange, burnt sienna peeking through the black and green branches that are still half-asleep. When the sun rises beyond the trees, tentatively into the sky, glowing yellow blazes of light spill dazzlingly into the sky that is still tired light blue. By the time I leave the house, the clouds are also painted in the sky. I see clouds, grey beards leading into indigo drum-rolls, silhouetted onto violet, floating in the sea of cerulean.
Summer is blue, late summer, at least. Blue, an intensely deep blue, looking as though teardrops had fallen into blue paint. That is the color of the sky in summer. Winter is white, that brilliantly pure white of the air and the sharp cold; or the childlike white of snowflakes swirling down from the sky, which is also white. But the sky is the white of age and of wisdom, and the snowflakes are like whispers and breaths of hope spoken to earth.
The end of autumn is gold. The gold of the leaves that lasted, spiraling down to earth at last. There is the gold of the sun as it sets on the horizon. The gold of the crackling fire inside one’s soul… Spring is beautiful, lighthearted pink. Pink like the magnolia petals that fall like a blanket on the newborn grass in April. Pink like the flowers I picked last May in the hidden part of the field; pink like a futile, fumbling hope, never to be fulfilled.
Red and black belong to me. Though I may admire the blue and the brown and the green, I will never be part of them. I am the fiery red, juxtaposed with austere black. I am the red passion struggling to break out into the world from inside the serene black pond. I have fire in me, rupturing in my words (which should be red). But I possess also the quiet of black water. Just as no one watches the sunrise, when no one is watching, I try to shine through the spidery black branches into the periwinkle sky.
From your wistful imaginative poet,
Ariel
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