Poem of the Week: Color Theory by Eric Leigh

Thank you to Alison McPhee for the selection of weekly poems.
And thanks to Eric Leigh for writing it.

“I envy your yard,” an old woman once said,
leaning over the fence we shared, pointing out
a cardinal and a jay. “They seldom coexist,”

she told me in the quiet voice of the lonely.
“If you have cardinals, you can get robins.
Just nail a half an orange to the side of a tree.”

And though I was young enough to want everything
I did not have, I never sliced that orange,
never nailed it to a tree. They stay with me still,

the things I did not do, the birds I did not call
with that proud color which refuses rhyme.
I’ve held sorrow closer than I had back then,

joy too. I know now how rare it is to see
those colors come to rest side-by-side—
the red breast, the blue.

—
For more information on Eric Leigh, please click here: http://www.amazon.com/Harms-Way-Poems-Eric-Leigh/dp/1557289301