April is National Poetry Month. To coincide with our current issue’s theme (The Blue Issue), we are sharing poems about photography and the color blue.
Cyanotype Poems
Dale Rio
Cyanotype poem by Dale Rio
Masks
Shel Silverstein
She had blue skin,
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through.
Then passed right by—
And never knew.
Fragmentary Blue
Robert Frost
Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?
Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)—
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.
Cyanotype poem by Dale Rio
Photographs
Barbara Guest
In the past we listened to photographs. They heard our voice speak.
Alive, active. What had been distance was memory. Dusk came,
Pushed us forward, emptying the laboratory each night undisturbed by
Erasure.
In the city of X, they lived together. Always morose, her lips
soothed him. The piano was arranged in the old manner, light entered the
window, street lamps at the single tree.
Emotion evoked by a single light on a subject is not transferable to
photographs of the improved city. The camera, once
commented freely amid rivering and lost gutters of treeless parks or avenue.
The old camera refused to penetrate the unknown. Its heart was soft,
unreliable.
Now distributed is photography of new government building. We are
forbidden to observe despair silent in old photographs.
Cyanotype poem by Dale Rio