Ode to the Indigo Bunting

You are not blue, not really—
but a trick of feathered lattice,
microscopic barbs bending light
into indigo illusion.
A prism perched on my wire fence,
you split the ordinary
into astonishment.

Summer is your longitude,
your body the compass
that inhales starlight,
exhales migration.
You read the Milky Way
like scripture,
winging south on constellations.

What is indigo, if not
the syllables between violet and night,
a threshold color,
ink before it dries,
a pigment of prayer?
You wear it as vestige,
a psalm sewn into a bruise,
your song a bright cipher
against the grain of dawn.

Fragment of sky, flame of my hedgerows,
what sermon do you sing—
that beauty is only refraction?
That even bones can carry
the language of galaxies?
That wonder arrives
winged and weightless,
dressed in an arc of color
that is not color at all?

*

Julene Waffle, graduate of Hartwick College and Binghamton University, is a teacher, family-woman, boy-mom, pet-mom, nature-lover, and life-liver. She enjoys pretending like she has it all together. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal Blog, The English Journal, Mslexia, The Ekphrastic Review, among other journals and anthologies, as well as her chapbook So I Will Remember (2020). Learn more at www.wafflepoetry.com, X: @JuleneWaffle, and Instagram: julenewaffle