Charles Wright

A bright, sunny day forecast for today with blue skies and warm temperatures.

Here’s a poem by Charles Wright, (born August 25, 1935), American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac. From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 50th Poet Laureate of the United States.

Cicada Blue

I wonder what Spanish poets would say about this,

Bloodless, mid-August meridian,

Afternoon like a sucked-out, transparent insect shell,

Diffused, and tough to the touch.

Something about a labial, probably,

something about the blue.

St. John of the Cross, say, or St. Teresa of Avila.

Or even St. Thomas Aquinas,

Who said, according to some,

”All I have written seems like straw

Compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.”

Not Spanish, but close enough,

something about the blue.

Blue, I love you, blue, one of them said once in a different color,

The edged and endless

Expanse of nowhere and nothingness

hemmed as a handkerchief from here,

Cicada shell of hard light

Just under it, blue, I love you, blue. . . .

We’ve tried to press God in our hearts the way we’d press a leaf in a book,

Afternoon memoried now,

seppia into brown,

Night coming on with its white snails and its ghost of the Spanish poet,

Poet of shadows and death.*

Let’s press him firm in our hearts, O blue, I love you, blue.

--Charles Wright

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* In a May, 2004 poetry reading, Charles Wright stated that “the poet alluded to is Federico García Lorca, the great Spanish poet from the 1930s. He has a poem that starts out "Verde, te quiero verde"—"Green, I love you green"—which I steal and change the color of, so no one will ever know . . .”