Is January Blue?

Thank you to my Aunty Caroline & Uncle Mike for the book: 'The Secret Lives of Colour' by Kassia St Clair.  This book inspired me to write this poem, and I hope that the shades of blue mentioned within reflect the many feelings that a new year can bring. 

For some,

The first 31 days of the year -

Propose a space to re-invent oneself,

To dust the Victorian Staffordshire Dogs -

From the antiquated shelf.

She turns them back-to-back for her husband is home,

Commanding that the paramour walks past –

As though Ozymandias;

A colossal, yet mighty

Outcast.

‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

For she last year, participated in a wicked affair –

Caught in a debaucherous snare.

Will January save them

From what might have become,

Or push them into the melancholy of

Midnight blue -

An ink soo opaque that they are unable to break through?

2500 BC,

Turquoise and azurite lay forlorn –

Daubed in rejection as a

A new blue was born.

Egyptian blue.

Pigments finer than the beads of dawn’s dew,

Were transcribed on papyri,

By ubiquitous men in mobbed markets

Sipping shai,

Sweating cane sugar

Warped in mint,

For a deconstructed blue-print.

The hieroglyphic –

Became prolific

In this ancient land

Host to thousands of characters

Fashioned from sand.

This national blue

Became second to

Ultramarine

Out of technical ease

And history’s ability for tradition to freeze.

Now, during the pandemic,

Time retired

And words felt uninspired –

By the beauty of foreign fragments

Journeying to stone,

When one is simply isolated and

Alone.

630 AD China.

On a journey to India,

A Buddhist Monk

Made a slight detour.

Shrouded in 1,000 woven threads of middle eastern azure,

Xuanzang arrived in a place

Enclosed between the high mountains of the Hindu Kush:

The Bamiyan Valley, pre ambush.

53 meters from heel to crown a large buddha wept

Tears for impending bloodshed.

Carmine crept down his stone-cold sadness –

Waiting for cultural destruction in 2001,

Whereby this ancient mountain-man would greet

The Taliban.

Buddhists travelled this Silk Road,

When the pair remained unbowed.

Declared as false idols in 2001,

The second man was stripped of his robe.

Ultramarine.

Thought of as obscene.

Dynamite has left them forever unseen;

Empty spaces reveal where they had once been.

Ultramarine.

Formed from fragments of Lapiz Lazuli

(The ‘blue stone’ in Latin),

An achromatin;

Unstained by historical wretchedness,

It holds onto memories of magic,

Which now seem wistfully tragic.

January 2022 sees tears of ultramarine,

Yet, on the Mediterranean they remain unseen.

Persons shattered cross the sea,

Seek safety,

From the men who murdered these ancient statues,

Ambused the news,

And surrendered the world into hues of blues.

***

Blue has been submerged into misery -

Traumatic history.

January a month of self-reformation,

For me is blue,

A month I would love to artlessly skip through.

Sitting on the tube in enduring ivory,

Frost sleeps on my glacier eyes

That reflect this month’s bitter skies.

Wickedness is dressed in lead white,

And beauty in January’s plight.

For beauty is found in the tomb of joy,

Discovered,

Yet, not lost

In buried permafrost.

Traumatic history

Is captured in previous years,

Full of laughter and cyan tears.

For if December is the blue opal bookend,

January is a time for old chapters to open and mend.

In these 31 days

After the Christmas holidays

Smile in sapphire

And laugh in the colours of labradorite,

As January can truly have days of aureolin sunlight.

I promise you this…

That days darkened by lead white

Cannot obliterate life’s prevailing fight

For bliss

Within the royal blue abyss

Of January.