Season without flowers or fruit
by Marge Piercy
This is the season when any color—
a red wheelbarrow left near a tilled under
flower bed, a surveyor’s yellow plastic
ribbon, a blue door—sticks out
among the greys, the browns, the blacks
drawing the eye to it, magnetized.
Eyes and brain hunger for color
for light as the sun dims trapped
in the briars, behind the pines
at noon as if pulled low to earth
and half gone out. So in a grim
era of greed and useless war
one brave enough to speak truth
glints like fire in a barren field.
Copyright © 2007 by Marge Piercy.