National (Bad) Poetry Month: Knitter's Color Walk

I don't usually think of Free Verse as being poetry at all. Carl Sandburg's "The fog comes on little cat feet" is a very visual, charming, memorable...I'd say, paragraph. Someone set it to a tune, and it was taught as a song to children in the California school system for a few years. I've sung that song. And I still say it's a paragraph. However, those who think that rhyme and rhythm tempt people to write poetry that is "bad" in other ways, and Free Verse allows people to use words in an artistic way, have a point too. So, for lovers of Free Verse, here's today's phenology post in Free Verse form...

Knitter's Color Walk 

"I want a blanket like that shawl you wear," she said.
I still have some ends of the same yarns I used in that shawl,
but not enough to make another blanket.
During the intervening twenty years
I've used up most of the crayon-rainbow yarn scraps
I've had, on dressing dolls to go with storybooks.
The bin of scraps and ends is full of browns,
tans, creams, and grays, with just a few bright colors.
How to make a picnic blanket in summery colors?

This morning, walking past the white oak grove,
I see last autumn's oak leaves, almost all down now,
piled on each side of the dark gray pavement.
White oak leaves are not white. They're a coppery brown
that fades to luggage-tan, burnt orange, camel,
or darkens to old-copper, even burgundy.
Only the white oak tree can mix pale orange
with dark reddish purple, and get something pretty.

Eyes focussed on the leaves, I see grass, dead and bleached
and new and verdant green. Brown earth. Gray limestone.
Green and yellow mosses. Green-black and pale aqua lichens.
White trillium flowers and fruit-tree-blossom petals.
Pale blue, dark blue, and white, and purple violets,
all four species that grow in the white oak grove, blooming again.
Yellow of dandelions, celandines, and burr-weeds
and also daffodils, and forsythia, out in the sunshine.
Pale pink and lavender cloudlets of redbuds
just starting to bloom in the week after Easter.
(This has been an odd year--three weeks of forsythia!)
Blue sky, blue-green reflections on the stream
and distant mountainside. Deep red maple blossoms.

Only the background harmony of oak leaves
blends such a clash of vivid colors.
Funnily enough
it's not unlike my yarn scrap bin...
Does everyone walk through a white oak grove
in spring, and notice wildflowers among oak leaves?
Can a knitted blanket make anyone remember
wildflowers, all caterwauling in competition
against that eye-soothing chorus of coppery brown?
Me, it can. Others? Likely they'll say,
"What ever made anyone think of using those colors?"

"The Fog" and many more...

(Some foreign reader will ask why the trees are called white oak...because white oak wood is a paler shade of brown than some other species of oak wood.)