A Poem by Rachel Hadas

Blue

When my son was two,
taken to the country for the first time
and held up to admire the rural view,
what did he see?
He told us: too much blue.
“I don’t like those blue mountains,” he said.

Looking at the powder-corpsy blue
walls of my Athenian apartment,
“Blue is a thirsty color,” J. decreed.
Those two would have agreed.
But those two comments were so long ago.
My son is grown. My friend is dead.

Rachel Hadas is the author of many books of poetry, essays, and translations. Piece by Piece (selected prose) and Love and Dread (poetry) were published in 2021; Pandemic Almanac, a new book of poems, is forthcoming in March 2022. She is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where she has taught for many years.