Yellow
You were so red, so white.
So much of you was blue.
Yellow is what I missed in you—
that brilliant optimism—
that power of the sun.
There was that black in you
that cancelled it out.
You were the artist who understood color the most.
That color created by the union of yellow and black, you knew.
Your white hair, confined in a pony tail
or streaming down your back
in your wild man look
prompted strangers to ask
if you were a shaman,
or declare you to be one.
That red that flamed out from your work,
subtly put there even in places where it had no
logical purpose for being.
That red tried to make things right.
All of us who knew you
knew the blue.
It was the background color of all of your days.
It was the blanket in which we wrapped ourselves at night,
trying to be close,
but always always divided
by blue.
For fifteen years,
I believed that one day I’d bring you to yellow.
There were splashes of it, surely,
throughout our lives together.
You on the stage, reading your heart,
me in the audience, recognizing
all the colors from within you—even yellow.
Finding the pictures you had taken of me
at the art show, looking at your work—
those pictures taken even before we ever met.
I discovered, after you’d passed,
that you had recognized
me even then, when I thought
I was the only one
angling for a meeting—
sure of my need to know those secret parts of you
that I will never know
now that you have given yourself
to the black
or blue
or red
or even to the white.
Whatever your ever after
has delivered you to.
A new life later,
I am suffused
by my own canvas
of memories of you—
every other pigment
splashed against
a vivid background
of yellow.
The NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a poem that repeats or focuses on a single color.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 
This is so beautifully done, Judy. I especially love the ‘brilliant optimism—that power of the sun’, ‘red that flamed out from your work’, and ‘I believed that one day I’d bring you to yellow’. These are my favourite lines:
‘I am suffused
by my own canvas
of memories of you—
every other pigment
splashed against
a vivid background
of yellow.’
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Thanks, Kim, for your close reading of the poem!
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My pleasure, Judy!
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Loved it. It brought out the complexity of the one you loved.
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Thanks for the positive response, Heather!
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My pleasure.
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This is not fiction, is it?
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No.
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Powerful
ann garcia
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Thanks, Ann.
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What a lovely tribute! Thanks for sharing it!
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Thanks, Janet.
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