Photo by Nadiia Ploshchenko
Gray and Green
Is it really three in the afternoon?
Not six in the morning
when the sun is a dim flashlight
and darkness lingers?
Dirty-gray heaviness hangs everywhere.
The ceiling to the sky has fallen
looking like dusty cotton
feeling like humidity.
Rain-soaked trunks are grayish-brown.
Roads are grayish-black
the neighbor’s house is grayish-tan
even the flowers are draped with gray.
And everywhere there is green exploding—
lime, shamrock, and chartreuse wallpaper. Awakened trees whose three-week-old foliage
is pristine, proud, and tender.
The damp grass conjoins with
the moss and clover carpet,
conspiring and conniving
to quash competing colors.
The birds are silent and still.
Do they think it’s nighttime?
Their bedroom is drenched in droplets,
drip, drop, plopping. Not stopping.
© 2022 gratefulsue
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I remember this day, when the clouds seemed to fall from the sky and yet produce light and rain at the same time. There was such thick fog, it was as if the sun had just risen, instead of being 3:00 in the afternoon. A beautiful experience of nature in dim, ethereal, ambient light.