Vowels into Colors

A mauve, E grey, I dark, U green, O . . . range.
I do not see you, vowels, in color, so
any paraphrase is clumsy, strange.
But you bleed into one another.  You
adapt and melt.  I feel the textures change.
Duffle coat, army blanket, green to brown:
color’s a garment taken off, put on.
A coded sonnet brick by careful brick
assembled or dismantled, layered thick
as paint splotched on the Haitian artist’s jeans,
the painter who was murdered in the street.
Eloquent, wordless, slathered over vowels,
color clumps and crackles, croons and howls.
Into the bath of silence colors seep
and saturate our sleep.

—Rachel Hadas