Soot and Light
In ‘Colour Blind Son’ by Susan Alexander, beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder.
Enjoy the opening stanzas, excerpted here from Issue 18, Spring 2018, on sale now until September 30th.
Colour Blind Son
by Susan Alexander
Years ago she showed him a copy of Brueghel’s
The Blind Leading the Blind and explained
how the artist chose faded pigments
to play up his subject. She insisted
they were almost
seeing the same painting.
Just as she told him that they see
the same world in twilight
and in winter
when the cold hammers down the colour range
to soot and light, to tones of tan and khaki.
It is not important to the young man
that his mother should understand
the palette he inhabits.
He does not tell her
that the riotous hues she sees
are all in her head anyway,
figments of her own particular perception.
Read the rest of this powerful poem, in Issue 18, Spring 2018, ON SALE now until September 30th!
Susan Alexander is the author of two collections of poems, Nothing You Can Carry and The Dance Floor Tilts, both with Thistledown Press. Her work has won multiple awards, most recently Vancouver’s City Poems Contest in June 2022. Her poems appear in anthologies and literary magazines in Canada, the UK, and the US and have ridden the bus as part of Poetry in Transit. Susan’s poem ‘Waffles and Strawberries’ appeared in Pulp Literature Issue 38, Spring 2023. She lives on Nexwlélexm/Bowen Island, BC, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Squamish people.
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