In Color.

We learn of the twisted rotting hands of death

at a young age, how it wraps its spiny fingers like a vice

around the throats of strangers you read about in the news.

Perhaps it’s a neighbor whose family comes one

quiet summer evening to fill the corners of the generally

vacant family room to bid farewell to the mother

who raised them, the grandmother who spoiled them.

You watch the strangers from your bedroom window

as they depart with tissues held to their eyes.

Perhaps it’s a friend’s mother, the one who picked you up

from summer sleepovers and soccer tryouts,

who took you out for milkshakes and pizza

after weekend tournaments and sung along

to the every song on the radio along the way;

until your own mother sits at the end of your bed one evening

to tell you that your friend’s mother has died,

spoiled by a cancer growing somewhere within her body.

You sit quietly beside your friend as the tears fall

from their eyes, a pain you’ve yet to understand.

And though we learn of death in fleeting moments,

one day we wake with the rose-colored glasses

slipping from our face and the colors of the world blending

into one another. the cold hand at our shoulder grabs tightly

at our throat and steals the breath from our lungs.

I wonder if I’ll ever see the world in color the

ways in which I did as a child, before the cold

grasp of death burrowed knotted fingers around my neck

and darkened the lights by which I see the world.