In the Days When Purple Was New
Ralph Pomeroy
...
Neverless, the Doge
must have thrilled, filling his purple vestments,
As he entered that
dazzling morning to marry the Adriatic.
Imagine the shock
of that first raiment
(Stolen, in a way,
from the sea itself)
To the shining
water and the expectant crowd.
Purple Asters
Robert Morgan
...
Down by the branch,
grass
darkens the same
color Charlemagne had
his Irish scholars
dye their pages for
jewelled lettering
to play on like cities
in the desert sky.
Purple, the royal
color, makes me happy. I love these
passages from poems that show it in all of its regal splendor and gladness,
like a fanfare of trumpets in Mozart—a celebration, a robing of kings, an
alchemy (miracle, even) when first the color was extracted from mollusks, sea
snails, in ancient times by the Phoenicians, the name Phoenicia meaning land of
purple.
What it would be to
live in a land of purple, with those Irish scholars and the Doge, and my jaunty—gentile—flowers from last summer.
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