There will be a time to crack another smile,
maybe not today or for awhile…
but we’re holding on to laugh again
someday.

-Tragedy + Time, Rise Against

gray like dust on a green cloth
wiped across the surface of my
bedside table, floating through
sun-splotted air, gray like dead
flies and torn feathers stuck
between cracks in the pavement
and eyes that have lost and
shrunk back into cold and silence.

yellow and gold like the halo that
rests around photo albums and movie
tickets and love letters that once gave
pain but now are better than nothing–
yellow like a memory of sunshine and
gold like hope wrapped in baby blanket
promises and spun around in ballerina shoes.
yellow like sickness, jaundice, wilting.

green like forbidden gardens laced with
poison, forced to bloom beneath the cracked
caskets of dead dreams, growing up thistles
over gravestones. Green like jealousy and
thirst and grasping at frail smoke trails
that launch themselves into the distance and
fade away around railroad tracks that
break off into nowhere.

black like the deepest griefs that cannot
resound with any color, traced like jagged
chasms across weary minds, tightened with
anger and pounded into stony silence
bricks stacked again and again, pacing
themselves into walls, bracing themselves
against rain and storms and shadows
and even light.

white, like a promise that lasts through days
of empty window-waiting. Pure as snow that
hides a thousand colors and skates over black
asphalt with clarity and shrill echo. White
shouting down black and brown and blonde and
streaking the hair with aches of hope. Holding
hands as breaths pressed into forever reveal
the soul is traced with rainbows and redeemed
to all things shining.

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.  For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
Romans 8:18-21