Saturday, April 26, 2014

24/30: Grief by Color


 
Black: mourning cloth for North America, Japan,
and Eastern Europe, just as if bereavement were a blind
and silent wait before a scheduled sunrise, or chambers
of a cave, unpathed, unlit, and terminal.
Korea, blue, a luminous liminal dawn and dusk that’s looming
overhead, turning lives to silhouettes. In Thailand
and Brazil, purpled widows are a newborn bruise.
In Egypt, yellow, sickly flesh, new flowers on a grave.
And India mourns in white, a cloud-cast day in which
the hours pass unmarked by sun but workplace clocks still grind
their teeth for timecards, ingredients must still be fashioned
into meals and placed into the mouth and chewed, bodies
must be bathed and lotioned, combed and dressed and shoed
and moved about and made to talk when all they want to do
   is sleep.

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