Sometimes, for me, the color yellow evokes Rebecca Elson’s poem Antidotes to Fear of Death (provided below). Today, as spring snow showers linger outside my window, I too stir myself into a youthful universe and into the light “of all the not yet stars.” I’ve been dreaming in yellow– seeing twirling sunflowers dancing across a bright blue sky. They smile and shine as they waltz in the open air above my head. The deep black mandorlas of their faces grin widely before becoming a thick gathering of clouds, a rain of seeds that falls to the earth in a great clatter of sound. Under the darkened sky, the mandorlas lie motionless. Dry husks, shells of the light that once danced above. But not gone. This fruit is treasure embedded with stardust, unconstrained, waiting and willing to explode once more. Curling and twisting under the soil, their yellow hearts are destined again and always for the brilliant, sapphire sky.
Read Elson’s poem today. Then, look around in search of yellow. Pay attention to the many ways yellow works to warm and welcome. Listen for the curling and twisting under the soil and know that by summer’s end, the sunflower’s will walk across the sky again.
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones: To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
Citation: Redmond, T. (2022, March, 12). Paying Attention to Yellow. Retrieved from https://theresaredmond.com/photography/paying-attention-yellow/
