love and complementary colors

I feel like you're finally easing in into NaPo, your more recent poems sound so effortless! By far, the one with the African violet is my favorite.

(Also, I don't get why you en-spoilered the one with the religious themes. Since when are religious themes PG 13? Lol. Religious poetry can be as sincere and heartfelt as non-religious poetry, or more generally, poetry based on temporal themes. So why hide something you expressly feel?)

Perhaps the news of Notre Dame is still fresh in my heart, but I want to frame this one and save it forever. Extended and all. <3

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The NaPo Buddies challenge this week was to try to use another person's poem to inspire your own. I liked @paperforest's poem 9 where she uses the line "you and i, we are driftwood" so much that I wrote two poems about driftwood. Go read paper's poem too, because it is really lovely.



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Once again I feel like I'm supposed to say something constructive like a good NaPo buddy but these are all so good.

#21 is just too real. Like it's exactly what I want to say in some of my recent writings but you said it better.

I've picked out a couple lines to maybe be the inspiration of today's poem, even though it won't measure up to these haha.

whoever first said love was blind, 
could not have known about swimming in dark cyan rivers, 
when the water was too cool to enjoy,
but the sand too warm not to try, 
until your skin burned red in the summer sun,
and catching the last mulberry drops of daylight, 
before the indigo sky gives you goodnight kisses, 
and you sleep knowing you'll rise to the pale tan
of the mourning dove's waking song.

whoever says love is blind,
must not know how strange it is
to see your mother's face in the mirror,
and they must forget to lie when she asks
if there are more grey hairs on her head,
and they'll have a hard time finding her favorite
pink azalea flowers at the supermarket.

whoever says love is blind,
must not have had a sister
to spend snow-white winter days with
until our lips turned frozen blue,
or a worn out brown mug that you would fight for,
or a forest green car that couldn't top 65 miles per hour
but had more scratches than you cared
to ever let your parents know about.

whoever says love is blind,
must not know many men who have
auburn brown hair when left untrimmed
and must not pay close enough attention
to his cotton-grey sweater
he's forever wearing and leaving, with the drawstrings
that are always too uneven.

whoever says love is blind
would not know about the way
some people smile with their eyes,
or surprise you when they speak,
they would never know about how sometimes
when you're in love your heart skips
a beat just to see them enter a room,

and i'm afraid i cannot join those who believe love is blind,
because i have a hard time forgetting dark cyan rivers,
or sunsets that fade drop by drop,
or every hue and shade that reminds me i'm in love.

I kinda just forgot where I was by the time I finished reading the extended version of 28. So beautiful and expressive and goosebumpy. <3

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Thank you again @JabberHut for your kind words! I feel like my poetry is getting kinda rambly/lengthy at the end here. But I'm glad you're still enjoying it!

Author's Note: I've been on working on different versions of this one for a long time - I like the idea of making content of a Wikipedia article incorporated into a poem on empty words - and I also just happen to think the entries on colors are really interesting with how scientific they get. I'll probably take another effort of editing this one after April, but wanted to get some version of it in for NaPo. The Wikipedia article I'm referencing in the poem is here: Wikipedia Article Reference Link One more poem to go after this to get to 30!

bonus formatting:

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Unnecessary Author's Note: I really do love all the people in my family, and don't mean to portray in anyway that I don't - this is just more of a processing piece. Oh! Also the top one is supposed to look like a tree.