Sunday 11 October 2015

Recipe for Blue

Dear Reader,

Thought for the week.

This week I learnt that Colin Firth's wife feels that, should you buy yourself a new dress or coat or whatever, that you should wear it at least 30 times before discarding it.   This makes me feel very old indeed and behind the times.  I still have, and often wear in the winter, a coat I bought at Marks and Spencer in 1985, thirty years ago.   Lots of the clothes I still wear I have had for at least fifteen to twenty years and I imagined  they were fine, but perhaps I need to get out more and buy something new.  Well it is just a thought.......
              
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I was having tuition from a Professor of Poetry in East Anglia some years ago when she told me my poems were too ordinary, too unadventurous, that I was to try harder with something different.  I did my best and wrote " Recipe for Blue"  although what it exactly means I am not sure.  Still I got an  excellent mark for it ....

Recipe for Blue


Take blue from the mountain

and dye my bones,

crush lapis lazuli,

mix it in my hair.

Plunge my heart in forget-me-nots,

soak my maidenhead in blueberry juice,

add a pinch of larkspur.

Wrap me in the Blessed Virgin's dress,

shake over star sapphires,

fold in the clouds,

and bake slow.

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With very best wishes,  Patricia

2 comments:

  1. A poem of great optimism, because it holds out so many possibilities. Your 'Recipe' could as easily be applied to Red, or Green, or Yellow, or Violet, etc. - all the colours of the rainbow in fact - and the baked delicacy would be equally delicious. It deserved a top mark. Well done, Cotswold Poet!
    Ours

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  2. I love your "Recipe" and admire all the hues of blue you found in it. It brings to my memory two beautiful poems, one by a Polish poet Konstanty Galczynski "Sapphire Ballad" and another - a translation by Boris Pasternak from Georgian "Blue" (by G.Tabidze). I was thinking that blue colour had different connotations for different poets and in their languages, in your poem I see the blue of nature, for Galczynski sapphire associates with magic, night, love and longing, for Tabidze it is the colour of sky and childhood happiness.
    With love
    Vera

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