Where a Poem Begins

Shadd Piehl reflects on the image, language, and lived moments that shaped “Projects.”

By Shadd Piehl

For me, a poem most often starts with an image or phrase that I can’t routinely dismiss. For this poem, “Projects,” that impetus was the color names on a paint swatch for a home project: “Halcyon Green, Quietude, and Copen Blue.” I thought the sounds of those words alone warranted an attempt at a poem. I’d also recently heard William Wordsworth’s sonnet, “The World Is Too Much With Us,” recited repeatedly and effectively by a couple of North Dakota Poetry Out Loud contestants at the state high-school competition. Wordsworth’s conceit that we “waste” our lives by obsessively “getting and spending” rang doubly true that day.

So, I copped Wordsworth’s opening lines and tried to work in those colors. I think perhaps the turn comes too soon in this poem, but otherwise I feel it is a pretty straightforward reflection of a remodeling project, an early spring day, Wordsworth, where we were in our lives, and my wife’s declaration when she finished painting the walls Copen Blue.

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Projects
This too-much-with-us world sings the blues,
Where our powers are wasted, late and soon.
The world’s web in our hands, that sorry boon,
My wife’s doomscroll and the digital news
Tell me to put down the phone and go roam
Into a spring that even today wants
To renew in varied shades, a paint swatch
For a project, renovate room-by-room
Our house of half our thirty-married years.
Colors: Halcyon Green and Copen Blue,
We discard for their cousin, Quietude.
A color to refresh a room, our lives
Remodeled, a den, an empty-nest home,
What’s next, states my love, a shed of my own!
-Shadd Piehl

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This essay was first published by In Pursuit, an initiative of More Perfect, a bipartisan alliance of over 43 presidential centers and many of the country’s leading educational and civic initiatives. Visit to learn more about the project.

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