The shortest of the wavelengths, the highestenergy, always your favorite.Sky and sea but not your eyes, not mine.Not the melancholy, though tied to that.Not even the heaviest grief, though anchoredin that difficult water. More the flow of liquidthrough veins, unoxidized, unexposed, pure.More the pea flower that turns boiling waterultraviolet blue, then shifts to hot pinkwhen a drop of citrus is added. More the bell.More shimmering, more lustrous. Morethe backdrop for clouds, and their alphabet-soupshapes, hieroglyphics of the air. Betweenviolet and cyan, visible, bright, you. Betweenthought and memory, between the fieldof energy we call the heart space, crochetedinto it. More the horizon, morethe Earth’s halo, more strata of mountains,more sublayer of sea. And let us not forgetdelphiniums and morning glories. Let us notforget your first words, the way your eyesopened each day for us, the way the worldentered, the way your laugh entered us.The rare M&M in the bag, the grape-flavoredlollipop. The berries we picked each summerin the field at the farm on top of the mountainfrom which we could see the mountainsthat border our lake. In one photo, you holdthe berry between tiny toddler fingers upto one eye, and the berry is biggerthan the orb through which life revealeditself to you. In another, the berry juicepaints your face from ear to ear—.and the joy feasting on sweet blue. The sapphireof the sea we explored by ferryboat, the ultra-marine, the lapis. Domes of churches, saintly robes.If truth had a color, this would be it. A shadeless than shady. Improbable skin of the godswho are ether. You now. You now. Movedfrom this world to the next. Moved from skinand bones to pure energy. Cobalt and indigo, and primary.You, your place, in this realm, in the next one.More teal where we live, and home to morphosand borage flowers, which scale any scaffoldand taste like cucumbers, also favorites of yours.At your celebration, a cache of dried forget-me-notsblew into the sand, smaller than tears sweptfrom an eye. Into the earth, I heard you say,let the ocean take it, let it wash away. There’s nothingleft to hold onto. Never was. Though I felt it,though I thought I could, though I believedyou were mine. Though I borrowed you. Thoughwe borrowed each other. Though we own nothing.
Meditation on Blue
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“Meditation on Blue” from SUPERBLOOM: by Catherine Esposito Prescott.
Published by Gunpowder Press on February 11, 2026.
Copyright © 2026 by Catherine Esposito Prescott.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Catherine Esposito Prescott is a poet, an editor, and a yoga philosophy teacher. Co-founder of the nonprofit SWWIM and editor-in-chief of the daily online literary journal SWWIM Every Day, she is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Superbloom (Gunpowder Press, 2026) and Accidental Garden (Gunpowder Press, 2023), winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks. Recent poetry appears in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Tahoma Literary Review. https://www.catherineespositoprescott.com/.
“Superbloom by Catherine Esposito Prescott is not merely a book of poems—it is a quiet act of devotion. In language both luminous and precise, Prescott traces the contours of unimaginable loss and transforms grief into something tender, reverent, and enduring. Like light filtered through stained glass, each poem refracts sorrow into unexpected hues of remembrance and renewal. Rooted in the natural world, both on Earth and beyond, these poems offer a sacred mirror that reflects the eternal bond between parent and child. Again and again, Superbloom provides the reader with moments in which unbearable absence becomes presence—where, as she writes, ‘Memories bubble up inside of me, each a pocket / of joy, iridescent and light,’ and even the deepest pain is made to shimmer—with faith, with radiance, with grace.”
—Caridad Moro-Gronlier, author of Tortillera
“Catherine Esposito Prescott’s Superbloom is a heart-rending tour of mother-grief. In this carefully calibrated examination of what it feels like to live past the loss of a child grown in one’s own body, Prescott find grace and faith, a tenderness almost shocking in the face of a loss so powerful its gravity could easily become a black hole of pain and anger. These poems insist on the continuity of all living beings, refusing Dylan Thomas’s rage, and supposing that Whitman may be right when he says ‘there is really no death,’ but of course, there is death, her son’s death, and the power of this collection is that it keeps both him and her in this world, held firm by each reader lucky enough to open this book.”
—Jason Schneiderman, author of Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire
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