June approaches, making the air electric and exciting, filled with love and celebration for the whole of Pride Month, Juneteenth, and well, just the small joys of being around to experience more summers to come!
As a way to encourage taking in some small joys within the wonderfully hectic season ahead for many, I’m taking the name of each hue from our Prism Collection (available online and in-store) and matching it with an excerpt of a poem sharing a title with that very name.
Spread calm. Spread presence. Spread small joys. Spread love.
Sunshine:
“Do you suppose the sun here lavishes his heat
For nothing in these islands by the sea?
No! The great green-mottled melons ripen in the fields,
Bleeding with scarlet juicy pith deliciously [...]”
(Hervey Allen, 1922)
Stone:
“...inside the body like a wild ocean
that consumes all possible attention,
an ocean whose quiet bottom cradles
the odd underside of stones, while
hard wind shakes up everything above [...]”
(Michael Ryan, 1976)
Shell:
“I found it in the wash, the orange
shell I picked up on the beach
that last time. One of my girls—
the one named after you—
must have found it in my room
and wanted it. Clean calcareous
curve, a palm open to nothing,
reeking of sunshine [...]”
(Harriet Brown, 2003)
Coral:
“And this was the day
The Lord made
The scuttling crab
And this was the day
The choir sang
Their song hammered into
These Latin roads
And this is the day worn
As a sea egg or coral star
A green headdress
Or a land crab
Boiling on the rim
Of a car wheel
The white coral church
Weighing anchor”
(Gregory O’Brien, 2018)
Lake:
“You are a broad white lake,
Silent.
On your surface people launch their brown sun-warmed
Souls.
Reflected in you, they see themselves
Tall, profound, mystical.”
(Nelson Antrim Crawford, 1921)
Sea Glass:
“[...]I worry you have little else
So I’m out for sea glass this morning
With fog and herons because the tide
Is low and time left short and because
You love it, each beached chip
Another for the shoebox full of mostly green,
Occasionally brown, rarely blue
Shards the sea has tumbled smooth
And harmless.”
(Stephen Cushman, 2000)
Galaxy:
“how do I show you love when it is not attached to a video of me putting a nail to a balloon on loop? when a heart beats fast this is what I imagine. something too fast to see happen / too loud to forget & from here, the ground, we are beginning to look like lightning or the frameworks of buildings too far away or the line where the lake meets the sky. you are every 1996 space exploration gone right & I am waiting for you to come home with a backpack filled with moon rock & stardust to keep around our apartment. we find small jars to hide behind our pillows & fill every corner with something only we have touched / the rest in our cat’s fur. you remind me of something like a firefly underneath my tongue with so much spark I am finally able to live out my dream of becoming some sort of lighthouse even though sometimes I fall back into a dark galaxy of faults. it isn’t always possible to jam sharp stars into the round holes of us. I want to tell you that SpaceX named a platform for rockets to land on Just Read the Instructions & another Of Course I Still Love You & wouldn’t it be nice to be still in the water for once”
(Beyza Ozer, 2019)
