Royal Flower Blue
I love colors that can’t decide what colors they are. Pinks that giggle gold, greens with blue tissues, violets that are part silver part breath. Spring dawns are good for that. This poem arrived through the seasonal babbling of hues.
Delaware Avenue lives in leaves on all sides, no matter how many houses try to poke through the green. Trolley Square is known for being a bar collective at night, but by day it has more of a walk-the-dog-in-sweatpants feel. In 2022, Counsilman Nathan Field and the Delaware Avenue Community Association organized the transformation of 18 utility boxes in the Trolley Square-area into paintings.
—Would you believe it if I told you that Counsilman Field reached out to yours truly when this initiative began, encouraging me to submit a design, but I just could not get my vision for it on virtual paper by the deadline to save my life?
The utility box I chose for this particular poem collage was painted by artist Lelane Rossouw Bancroft. It is entitled “Rockford Water Tower,” and it lives on North DuPont Street, an avenue that lifts from Delaware Avenue like a finger. The box stands in front of Brew HaHa, a cafe that has been a northern DE business for almost my entire caffeinated life (there is more to talk about regarding the BHH cafes, but that will come later). I took the utility box for a smaller sky, one that the big morning sky was going to walk over to at any moment and drink. I like to think someone passed it on their way into Brew HaHa, thought something similar, and took the poem collage with the intent of keeping it safe from our thirsty heaven.
Gilded roseate cherry
royal flower blue,
the glossolalia of spring sky
withheld from lips.
The alley shrugs in dandelion clocks,
and the back door opens
onto indigo’s vegetable garden.
Another morning, Wilmington, and I find you soaked in shine.
Take and be well.