Most poems about sadness reach for storms. Samantha Harper's "Color Poem #2 Blue" reaches for something quieter, a mood so muted that she has to coin a word for it: "blue-ish." That hedging suffix sets the tone. The speaker is "lost / But not hopeless," and the poem never lets either half of that sentence cancel the other. What follows tries to describe a feeling that sits between categories: sad but soft, calm but sinking, painful but oddly welcome.
The central idea comes in the middle, almost as a confession: blue is "a color i hope to feel instead of nothing." Here sadness is not the enemy. Emptiness is. Blue is preferable because it proves something is still being felt, and the speaker knows how that sounds, admitting it is "comforting in a slightly unhealthy way." That honesty, with no pretence that the feeling is simply good or simply bad, is what drives the poem.
The imagery works by pairing opposites. The speaker describes "drowing in your own ocean," so the water comes from inside, and she is "calmer than you should be." This is drowning without panic. The next line, "Not having the mental capacity at the moment to swim," is oddly flat and practical, as if the problem were a tired mind rather than a lack of will. The hurt that "caresses your heart with numb fingers" is a small paradox in itself, since a touch that cannot feel is the numbness the speaker later says she wants to escape. (I read "plane" in "a dull, plane, hurt" as "plain.") Then comes the lullaby image: "A mother softly singing you to sleep with tears in her eyes." The figure who soothes is also grieving, so comfort and sorrow share one body. The shift from "I" to "you" in these lines widens the feeling beyond one person, as though the speaker expects the reader to recognise it.
There is no regular meter and no steady rhyme. The poem is free verse that follows the pace of speech. It opens with short, hesitant lines ("I am lost"), lengthens into the flowing lullaby stanza, then tightens into a three-beat list: "a calm color / A sad color / A peaceful color." The repeated frame rocks like a cradle, and "sad" sits between two soothing words and is softened by them. The longest, loosest line follows: blue is "also the color of my skies that make my day so happy and beautiful." It reads like a correction. Having made blue the colour of low moods, the speaker remembers that it is also the colour of good weather, and she refuses to let the word mean only one thing.
Because the poem has been unrhymed until now, the closing couplet lands with a click. "Depressed" and "rest" are a true rhyme, and the sound works like the last note of a lullaby, or a lid being closed. The final apology is also telling. "Please excuse my blue-ish mood if it makes you depressed" is polite, even self-effacing, as though the speaker expects to be a burden. The one clinical word in the poem is placed in the listener, not in her. Her own name for the feeling stays gentle and imprecise. "A long deserved rest" echoes the lullaby and the inability to swim, and can be read simply as earned tiredness. Next to "drowning," though, the word carries a faint shadow, and the poem leaves that ambiguity open.
The title shapes how we read it. The date stamp, "10-5-21," makes the poem feel like a diary entry, a snapshot of one day's mood. "#2" suggests it belongs to a series of colour poems, though that is an inference from the title alone.
The poem matters for how closely it observes an in-between state that many readers know but rarely hear described. It does not dramatise despair or offer a cure. It sets down a mood in its contradictions: it is soothing and sad, it is a relief from numbness and a little worrying, and it is the colour of the speaker's worst days and of her sky. Its unpolished surface, with a few spelling slips, only adds to the sense of a feeling caught as it happened.