Blue and Silver
poem for a Friend
Never learned how to find
silver linings…just how to
wait for clouds to pass.
It thunders so much here
we’ve become numb to the sound,
we chase lightning bolts on
the shoulders of steel horses—
convince ourselves
crackling is the sound of a hearth,
burning is the touch of a sun
kissing us to perfection.
We bottle thunder bolts in fifths,
save them until we have enough to light up the sky
one more time because we’ve forgotten
what blue looks like.
We’ve started to crave that blue,
even beat it out of ourselves:
not all of us make noise
and some of our bruises
don’t even show,
we’re thirsty in a rainforest,
so we collect drops of our ourselves,
any blue we can find,
we collect so much, we start to float—
high enough to join the clouds, to find out
all the silver has been made into spoons.
1art by Pragna Gaddamedi (@prgs.jpeg)
Poetry Tip of the Day!
There’s a special state of mind we are able to tap into only on planes. No signal and three tequila shots from the airport lounge swirling around in your belly give access to a different kind of flow state—one that makes it 1) way easier to focus without the phantom buzzing in our pockets and 2) makes us sit with and work through thoughts we may be repressing. One of these flights gave birth to this poem about clouds that never move. The clouds that make us cry and lightning that always strikes. Some of us are privileged to not have experienced such weather, but this poem is for those of us who have and found the sky again. It is also for those of us still looking for it.
Also, Four-Fours Poetry finally has its own custom domain! You can find this Substack at sahib.ch, instead of that long sahibchandnani.substack.com nonsense. If anyone remembers the old page at the sahib.ch domain, you’re a real one. If not, you weren’t missing much. For the last 4 years it’s been a graveyard for poems I’ll never touch again in publications that no longer exist. And I actually post on this one, so we’re all better off now.
goat