Why
is the Sky Cerulean?
by Richard Allen Taylor
It’s
complicated. When I was your age, we called
this
color (referring to the hue of clear April air)
sky blue, but as poets aged, they longed
for a new,
less
ordinary blue, and called it cerulean, replacing
one
cliché with another. But we always knew
sky
could be something else, gray as a dirty
vacuum
cleaner bag, or maybe onyx or obsidian
at
midnight. At day’s end, you might see a sky streaked
with
rose-colored feathers. Always pulling down shades,
we
found inspiration from automobiles, whose
blues
were named by marketing departments:
Aegean,
Nitrous, Artic. Blue Candy Metallic
sounded
nice but couldn’t displace sky blue. For
more,
we
found crayons labelled Pacific Blue, Denim, Wild Blue
Yonder,
Robin’s Egg, Cobalt, and Cornflower.
If
you’ll step into the bathroom, I’ll introduce you
to
my personal suggestions for blue sky names:
Shower
Curtain Blue, Damp Towel Blue and
my
favorite, Shaggy
Toilet Seat Cover Blue. But
none
of them got enough votes. So, don’t blame me,
but
that’s why the sky is cerulean.
Richard
Allen Taylor is
the author of four poetry collections, most recently Letters to Karen Carpenter and
Other Poems (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2023). His poems, articles
and reviews have appeared in Rattle,
Comstock Review, and Aeolian Harp, among
others. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Taylor formerly served as
review editor for The Main Street Rag and
co-editor of Kakalak. After retiring
from his business career, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens
University of Charlotte and now resides in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.