White

WHITE

Thumbs up for the whiteness of white, pure, 
natural or gently recreated on a dentist’s chair. 
How beautiful it manifests itself in smiling! 
Would I wish otherwise for me but to 
display it, giggling, in a gleaming double row?

Fashionistas flaunt the pastel off of it in textile, 
up to the nth degree of ecru, fresh, summery, 
though its ivory on furniture is unsightly, 
smacks of sloth and derelition, darkening 
with the onslaught of time and smoke. 

Can they not, brush in hand, minister to
its mellowed, yellowed dullness, the slow 
crisscross strokes obediently correcting, 
obliterating jaundice? Which scrupoulous 
makeover doesn’t do justice to a body?

I dread the bulky, overbrightness of it, bluish, 
harsh, in a stretch of frozen land. The awful, 
frequent spading of it, come winter. Laugh at 
its scoffed at inelegance in gentlemen’s socks. 
Allow me to calculate its whiteness in an 

elephant, that I may stay afloat. Dread the 
paleness of it on a frightened face- all the 
shades from waxen to ashen to green, the 
lifelessness of a chloroform smelling body 
lying still, in wait, at a funeral parlour.

To adore it in the spirit of a guileless child,
in the frolicky gait of White Dorper lambs,
in the sheer beauty of the Cliffs of Dover.
To delight myself, rightly, in the wisdom 
of its waving in peace or in surrender.
Copyright © | Year Posted 2018

Poem

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March 15, 2018 at 7:28 AM
nice write...
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