Coloring The World
A poem
A poem
Each color arrives carrying its history.
Red, the flare of sunrises spilled across tillage,
bloodlines braiding through generations.
Yellow, a butter dish at breakfast, the yolk’s sacrament,
light pooling on late summer’s thrashed wheat.
Blue, a pause between stanzas, the mind’s own sky
where clouds are shaped from allusion’s leavings.
Green arrives on a breath released,
the world’s greathearted oratories of maple, willow, meadow.
And violet, that faraway church bell
pulled through damp April air as evening thickens,
calling the scattered flocks
to make their row-by-row ingathering
while there is still light to see by.
Each pigment bears the weight
of all that has happened.
Whether sanguine or saffron, beryl or umber,
colors exist along the sliding scale
of human subjugation and release,
our soul’s windowpanes,
our weave upon the world’s rough loom.
How many days, how many nights
lie crushed into the blues we call dawn,
shadows thrown across the faces of those we love?
What hidden paths of bougainvillea or trumpet vine
burn through the stoppered molecules of crimson paint
until it runs molten,
staining the canvas of everything we know?
There is no fixing of meanings,
only the suggestions of hue, waves of becoming.
In the hourglasses of perception, sands forever shift,
leaching one into the next
pomegranate morning,
chartreuse hollering its brief ascendancy at noon
before descending
into dusk-violet’s covenant,
with mineral darknesses.
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