A Poem for the Road...

I wrote this poem to close out our Project Bridddge. It emphasizes the strained race relations not only in Durham, but in our society as a whole. I hope you enjoy it, and thanks for reading:)

Color

I hate color, all color. All ideas of perfection and imperfection.
I hate midnight black and sunset gold. I hate them for their differences.
I hate soft whites and blazing reds. I hate modest yellows and tender violets.
I once looked around and saw the variety of our reality, and I realized I hated myself.

I hate my eyes and my skin and my hair and my voice and my height.
I hate my dreams and my hopes, my sorrows and my laughter.
I hate tomorrow and I hate today, because I’m still the same, the same as everyone else.

But it wasn’t always like this. Before I knew the words that made me different she was still my sister and he my brother. She talked different then as well, but “different” wasn’t a word I used. All I knew was that she was beautiful, and I could stare at her linen white smile and laugh into the night because she would be there in the morning.

I was jealous of my brother’s skin, bronzed in the sun and glaring in its own shade through the shimmer of summer haze as he ran into the surf, but they told me that was the very thing I must hate. So I did, and I found pale specters to run alongside me, showing me how to hate and how to reach for sameness.

Then one day I glanced around and all the color was gone. There we were, mirroring ourselves in homogeneity and ringing our bodies into halos, closing out variety.
And in the cold, stark bleakness of our heaven, I wept for my sister and cried for my brother. I called out for them in the night and under the old stars, but they were gone.

My feet bled as I searched through old neighborhoods where their shacks once stood. My hands ached as I carried lumber and tools, rummaging through warehouses where we used to build them houses. My eyes grew dim in the schools, reading age old texts and looking for answers from the wise, whose dust rotted in colorless coffins.

Then, on a day when I thought the shadow would blot out my own portion of creation, I found my brother and my sister. But as I reached toward them I recoiled, my heart lurched, and sweat sprang to my snow-white skin. Because we hated them, they tried to change. Cheap cosmetics, suited for whores, ruined my sister’s face, and my brother’s bronze frame sat broken on the curb, ashen and weak in his attempt to disappear.

I begged them not to go, but they no longer recognized me. I was one of the masses, grasping at uniformity and damning their variance. They disappeared into the crowd, because now they were the same. But now I had changed, and all the weight of heaven broke me, leaving me to wonder if I would ever love color again.