26 September, 2024
The Belfast Review
The versatility of poetry allows a building up of layers in its portrayal of a person, place, thing, or time. Associations are conjured, followed by leaps in time and place, even to the moon and back – all linked to the central thread. Poems that are more tightly bound to exploring different ways of viewing the same thing, are often called a “study.” Many of us probably remember our first attempts at poetry in school involved this type of poem. Perhaps we were instructed to pick a season, a colour, an emotion and then name everything that could be associated with it.
It's the task of the poet to take a common everyday thing or concept and invite us to view it in ways both familiar and strange, to build up concepts both large and small until we came to a final understanding (or not!) of what we thought we always knew. It's a bit like the scene in Alice in Wonderland when Alice encounters a stranger who is so startled by her appearance that he views her in rapid succession through a telescope, a pair of spectacles, a magnifying glass, and a microscope. The changing perspective allows him to enact a kind of poetic study – to learn and unlearn everything about her before arriving at his conclusion.
This week's poet takes on the study of the colour blue. Get out your microscopes.
POETRY
FANNA
Everything Can Turn Blue
you / swim through time, breathe a rhyme / crumple—better, tear it into pieces / let the wind carry it to the blue sky / sprinkle it as snow—baby blue / tinge every entity / every existence is blue / a second of your lost childhood / the minutes of adulthood / an eternity of your fallen dreams / winged with navy / glinting in the icicles of a blizzard / cutting through blue veins of a broken heart / a hand left empty for long / a breath held deep in darkened lungs / coloured cetacean / ashes carried in a current / countless stories of you / birds burning in the ocean / a sun at the horizon / craves the blue, dips its ruby rays / into the indigo ripples / fails / births a blue moon / pours aquamarine onto earth / the ravens fly to it / sapphire beaks / singing an azure hymn / in memory of
AUTHOR BIO
Fanna is a writer, poet, and a 1998 born. Her work attempts to serve the mystical as well as the extraordinarily ordinary around us. She lives in Jaipur, India where she sips on historical aesthetics and admires a hot cup of chai. You can find her on X slash Twitter, @fannawrites or on her terrace, silently staring at the moon.
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