Color, Corrected

Michelangelo hated painting.

When he painted the chapel, he did so cursing,

Grumbling

With clenched teeth

Writing poetry to the onerousness of his

Singular, monumental task.

He exacted his revenge on the Pope

By framing the altar fresco in ultramarine,

That rarest and most costly hue.

When Vermeer dressed his Milkmaid

In the brightest of blues,

The price was as dear as gold—

Rare stones imported from Persia,

Ground by hand,

Turned to dust with sweat and muscle,

the stink of wax and pine rosin.

Brought forth from the labor of human hands

In a process passed down through ancestral craft.

So I must correct the record on the matter of blue.

It is not sad at all.

I know this; I am blue myself.

Blue is rare, ambitious, precious.

It is the product of generations that stretch back through time

Brought to bear upon the stones of the present.

It endures.

It makes a milkmaid rich as Croesus,

Makes itself a thorn in a Pope's side.

Blue is a gift of human labor,

To mark the seas, the wrist veins,

The skies where dwell the saints,

The cloth in the hair of a girl

Who insists upon being

Where others said she should not.