Adult English Division - Second Prize - Patricia Lee Lewis (Westhampton)
A KIND OF YELLOW
It is always yellow, your color,
your hair, the light I saw when you were
born, yellow like raw silk, goldenrod
like laughter. Now, yellow moves on walls,
late afternoon, the time of day you died.
It's lovely here at home in winter. Sky so clear
the swollen moon should fall from lack
of holding. It's lovely, skeletons of oak
and birch and beech run black like ink
pulled wet across the tender yellow
sky. It's lovely here. You died
in February on a day so cold I huddled
in the bus toward home. Snow was yellow-
brown on roads, no sun. Not then, not
for a long, long time. In the hospital,
your hair was streaked as though by rivulets
of tears. The kitchen phone was ringing,
the voice dulled and yellow. It could not say
your son has hung himself, it said something
is wrong, Mrs. There is a kind of yellow
in a black-eyed Susan's heart, the tiny points of pollen
waiting. From these more flowers bloom
or honey flows, or mothers draw their sustenance
when spring arrives and something yellow grows.
Patricia Lee Lewis leads writing retreats at Patchwork Farm in western Massachusetts and internationally. She celebrates our relationship to the earth as sacred, to writing as a way of finding what is deepest within us, and to teaching writing as a participatory, supportive endeavor. She holds an MFA degree in Creative Writing from Vermont College, and a BA from Smith College, Phi Beta Kappa. Visit Pat and purchase her self-published chapbook of poems, A Kind of Yellow at www.writingretreats.org.
