The Crayon of Love

A poem about childhood and other things

Photo by shraga kopstein on Unsplash

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This poem appeared here in my fourth-ever Substack post, in early May 2023. This feels like a good time to offer it again.

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COLORING JESUS’ BEARD                                                      2011


In a bright, narrow room furnished close to the floor, 
kindergarten Sunday School has sung songs and heard a story

and now we are sitting at low tables, sharing a big box
of crayons, to color pictures of Jesus and the disciples,

and I (that’s me, the chubby solemn one with bangs
and a wheezy cough) am digging through the crayon box

to find my favorite, a stub of deep blue-green,
with which I plan to color in that funny shape

that outlines Jesus’ chin, a shape that I imagine
(having seen at a guess exactly no bearded men

in my first five years of life) to be some special decoration
for Bible people, since the disciples have them too.

I have already used sunshine-yellow to color the shapes
on the disciples’ chins, but the one on Jesus needs

my favorite crayon, deep blue-green, the crayon of love;
Jesus loves me, we sing in Sunday School, and songs and stories

have already outlined that love in my kindergarten heart
and started to color it in, nesting shapes in crisp borders

laid out in a picture I partly see, mostly guess at, and so this morning
I love Jesus with the blue-green crayon, and by making room

for my classmates’ hands as we sort the colors together.
				And if Heaven turns out to be

(it wouldn’t surprise me) something like kindergarten Sunday School —
a light, good-tempered place where song and color flow

as free as story, and all God’s children gather to make gifts
for God and for each other and for fun — if Heaven is anything

like that, and Jesus is the teacher, then I picture myself
(that’s me, the chubby solemn one with shy shoulders

softening bit by bit) at watch in the quietest corner,
not joining yet the crowd around the teacher’s chair, loved enough

to find myself in the room where he is, hoping 
for no more than that — until, across a joyful

unmeasured distance, he looks at me, and what I see
in his face sends me running, shyness melted, to his side;

the eyes, yes, the hand outstretched, the smile — a grin
really — those things the songs and stories taught me

to expect, but not the blue-green beard through which 
his mouth laughs as he calls me, coloring in my name.

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It warms my heart to look back at that little girl, busy with her crayons. She has a year or two, yet, before her family’s Great Shadow (every family has one, right?) falls on them and changes their lives forever; she has a year or two or three before she becomes self-conscious about her chubby body and her extraordinary imagination. Right now every part of her is busy soaking up color and light and song and, especially, story. Most especially the Jesus-loves-me stories that she hears in kindergarten Sunday School.

That kid is alive inside me, still. She’s stubborn and funny and easily spooked, and a lot of work. I sometimes think she’s the reason I’ve lived this long. I know for sure she’s the reason I’m a poet. Well, she and the guy with the blue-green beard.