Color of Healing
Opal Moore
 

If only all the colored world would dis

appear, leave a hole polka dot canvas

world of missing tears.

 

But who would they be without sorrows the

errors of their ways, the arrows of their errors,

their ways their means. Their meannesses.

What they might have gleaned that time, or this.

 

If grief were a color we’d be one people.

People of grief. People of a color. Color the people

grief.

 

What is color? A music. Ambient soundscape.

Earth murmurs invisible to the ear.

What is the sound of red or blue or yellow:

Hum of a woman behind a window.

 

What is color? A line. Horizon red

Or twilight blue. 

A line. Stop.

A law. Habit? Design?

 

Once upon a color.  A measure of time in

apples and leaf. 

Once upon a passion. A joy.

A before. Time before time.

 

What is color? To chameleon? To the bee?

What is light to a seed or bloom?

Signal? Sign. Summons?

 

What is color and light to a field wild, original—

to its scion? Taker. Master?

 

Is it scripture? Treatise. Proof?

 

What colors do not appear

on a wavelength of light?

 

Is pink a color?

The opposite of black

on the wheel of un-colors?

 

Let’s say white is a blur of colors

our eyes forge of sun,

musics of our vision’s manufacture

out of day, out of night, light from dark.

 

What is color? A manufacture of my eye. 

A sleight of light.

Deception? Illusion. Design?

 

They say

if only the colored world would dis

appear into a hole of white.                           

 

Oh! But grief

would be white. Color less.

Less colored.

 

Particulate.

Let’s say white is illusion

fusion, is no albino gleaming

absence of color. Is

not a blindness.

 

Then choose: a color for grief,

a color of feeling.

Feel me?

 

Wheel of color

Spin. Do not pause

at blue, yellow, red or

green. Can you see the

ultraviolet of grieving?

Of joy? The color of healing?

 

Do not ask of black.

You may not posit black. Black—

it’s not in spectrum light. Does not

disaggregate. Will not particulate.

 

Black be  

a lyric thing. 

Blue and yellow, red 

And green. 

                                                                                                                       

Black be lyric.

Blue

Yellow, red

Green.

                                  

Black.

Be.

Lyric.