"periwinkle..."

it is the color of my daughter's baby quilt,
stitched by hand, and carried across the sea
to gather around her...like the African twilight
falling on a landscape teeming with birds, and
eyes that glow golden from the dark corners of
the veld...

it is the color of the wide front door on our
butter yellow cottage, a leaded glass
window to see the world through,
it's casement a perfect framing for the
living, ever-changing and evolving
photograph of morning glories climbing
the porch rail in the summer, and icicles
dripping from the eaves on a blue cold
Colorado morning...

it is the shade of blue that catches in
my throat like a perfect poem, the cool
breeze that breathes off Mt. Harvard, and
lifts my hair on a hot, dry Arkansas Valley
day in July, a lyric so beautifully crafted it
resonates like a tuning fork through the
chambers of my being...

it is the perfect french blue of an oxford
cloth shirt, the checked dishtowel carefully
laid over a rising loaf of bread, the scarf
my daughter knit..in careful rows..
last christmas, the breast feathers of a bunting,
a single hydrangea petal....

it is a rare shell washing up on the sands of my
life...a reminder...
of the serendipity of periwinkle...