Yellow Oranges

My mother paid for painting classes for me.
There were no artists in the family,
and maybe by coincidence, there were no saints.
I was only nine, and I don’t know what she thought.
In later years, she’d despair: ask where she’d gone wrong,
and what hell was this she’d walked into. 

Painting classes were my hell. Endless hours,
designing yellow oranges and blue hearts
for a Valentine’s Day I never knew existed.
Ignorance is a bliss and a bore;
and then something to cry over, when torn away. 

I stopped going when I was ten.
My mother shouted, my father didn’t care,
and stayed silent behind his newspaper.
There are no artists in the family, it seems,
and no sympathy to spare from my father’s eyes.
My mother cried, said I’d be nothing more
than a petty lab-coat scientist, like him,
thinking up blue hearts and pretending
that life didn’t shatter love. 

She claimed to love him once.
Sometimes I think she lies, and sometimes not.
She claimed to love me, once,
until I stopped painting yellow oranges.
And now I think she was wrong: no blue hearts exist,
but yellow hearts, and blue oranges, could factor into things.