A Blue Offering
A Flicker of Danger Before the Flame
Ask yourself this: what’s the colour of a jacaranda in bloom?
A kind of blue, some would say.
A mauve prison, he would explain.
Blue was a pause born in the shadows of a marvellous scandal.
A pretty shade of despair.
A flicker of danger before the flame.
He discarded youthful things to make more time for sleep.
Blue is not a number, he said, but a note.
A fret slide. A flat five.
His hands became maps: patterns of rearranged concepts.
Blue is an electronic city, he said, and a grassy knoll.
Blue is a structure, crystallised and melting.
Stevi-Lee Alver is an Australian writer and tattoo artist. She lives in the middle of Brazil with her wife. She loves bush walks and waterfalls but misses the ocean.
“A Blue Offering” in response to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and to Marcus Skipper’s sculpture “Portrait of Alan Marshall”.
Read more of my poetry here:
