A Plague of Purple
Colors in a dun-colored world.
Seemed important once to people.
The earth was splashed with all the colors we could want
But it wasn't
enough for us.
We wanted colors of our own
With which to
decorate our straw-colored houses,
Our clothes of beige, our streets of tan
And temples of granite gray.
And that would have been fine. save that we could see
They did not equal
the beauty of the unspoiled Earth.
So we made colors for ourselves
Some harder to
make than others
We came to value those hues, not so much for their
beauty
But for their
rarety; how hard they were to extract.
To esteem above the simple blues and yellows and reds.
The purples, rarest
of all the hues - most prized
And so, of course, the color reserved for kings;
No matter if the
monarch's hair or complexion clashed.
It was purple and rare and special and exclusive.
And everyone
wanted it - to rise to the purple.
I've never cared for purple.
It's not red, not
blue nor any happy color.
Rare in God's paintbox precisely because
It should not be
over-used.
Too much purple oppresses subtler shades – ask any artist
So too, the clawing
kings, princes, monarchs and potentates
Proudly rising – grasping to win robes soaked in it
Are a plague of
purple unrelenting.
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