once upon a time, you and i:
A Poem by Amelie Chadwick
"blue-green or blue-purple?" i ask.
we're talking about veins. you ponder it, look at your wrists (i could loop my thumb and forefinger round them with room to spare. they're curiously small and i think of sparrows)
and decide "both".
"you can't be both," i say, and it's my turn to look.
sure enough, purple canals wend their way off of blue rivers, their estuaries tinged green where your arm becomes a hand. it's a strange afternoon, cloudless but the light feels blunted, your garden an echo of itself. summer didn't wake up, it lies drowsily in the sky, you and me doing the same underneath.
you say something and i miss it, caught outside myself in a sudden awareness of how soon this present will sigh and roll over into the past and there's nothing to be done about that at all. your pulse flickers where i'm holding it captive. i blink. "hmm?"
"cup of tea?" you look like you aren't sure whether you're allowed to have asked. i stand up and brush myself off, then smile at you. "genius," i declare. "yes".
i stretch out my hand, an unfolding from myself, and you take it.
A Statement by Amelie Chadwick on her process
I’m not sure when I realised that poetry could not only be beautiful in itself, but possessed the power to translate reality into a beautiful version of itself, if the right words were chosen. This poem was my attempt to detail the more unreal, entirely subjective version of the reality of a moment that I experienced. My friend and I, in their garden, compared the colour of our veins. It was summer, just about. I think we ate sliced oranges and took photos of each other with the faded blue paint of their shed in the background.
Poetry, for me, is a way of remembering - a way of affirming momentary thoughts and feelings and putting them in writing so that they stick. Instead of taking photographs, I write poems. Looking back, they become windows into the emotional reality of a moment, and through them I am able to see my life for all its beauty and feel again something that might otherwise have been lost.