A Hellish Error

He was a fairly settled fellow.

A quiet soul who’d rarely meddle –

except with red and blue, the only hues

he could construe. Indeed, he mixed chromatic

marvels from the two: subtle rosy azures,

reddish purples, lavenders in every tint

from light to dark and faint to bold –  

“Behold!” the brightest made a friend remark:

“this day-glo violet could rival gold!”

He’d heard of gold. He knew that others

could see gold. And he had heard of what he

understood to be its drastic cousin yellow.

It frightened him – the way imagining

the third dimension might bedevil one who only

knew dimensions One and Two. He went to sleep

that night and fell into a glaring dream whose

scheme appeared to him sadistically to want

to plunge him in the molten colors of the Sun.

In a field of groundless white he met

the unimaginably bright catastrophe of Yellow.

He ran and ran and woke a blasted man.

No more was he a settled fellow. We hear him

bellow, sometimes, from his bed, to which

he’s fled in terror. Yellow is a hellish error.

.