A Poem - International Colour Day

 

       Volume - 1                             Issue -2                     March 2025     

International Colour Day

 

The spectrum, split by God’s prismatic knife,
bleeds myths into grids—cerulean, rust, vermillion—
a taxonomy of light dissected for trade.
We name them like orphans, these orphans of fire,
while corporations patent the pulse of dawn,
sell back the sunset in aerosol cans.
The sky, once a covenant, now a logo;
our retinas scroll through branded rainbows.

In caves, ochre hands pressed rebellion on stone—
red not a hue but a verb, a we exist.
Now Pantone codes parse our grief into swatches:
mourning is #2B1B17, rage #FF0F07.
We’ve bartered the aurora for HEX tattoos,
let algorithms mute the bruise of dusk.
What’s left when we filter the wild from our eyes?
A world rinsed of awe, scrolling in grayscale.

Consider the politics of yellow—how saffron
stains both monk robes and riot shields, how gold
gilds temples and oligarchs’ yachts the same.
Turquoise: the scream of glaciers calving to nil,
a cyanide river’s Instagram shimmer.
Even green, that liar, sells us Eden
in plastic-wrapped sprigs. We’re baptized in dyes
that poison the wells where the earth once bled pure.

The screen glows: neon gamuts hypnotize
synapses. We’re moths to the backlit void,
our dreams pixelated, our longing outsourced
to VR sunsets that never burn flesh.
Children point to strawberries, call them #FF4D4D—
language itself unspooling to code.
The moon, that old poet, pales at the glare
of cities hellbent on outshining the stars.

Yet—in the cracks, fugitive colours rebel:
a weed’s violet spite through concrete, the flush
of two faces close in a subway’s dim hush,
the unscripted gradient of decay on fruit.
A street artist sprays midnight back into teal,
a widow dyes her sari the shade of his laugh.
Colour, that anarchist, slips its leash,
revives in the margins where control goes blind.

So let’s sing the unnamed—the tint of regret
after the phone rings dead, the tone of a scar
remembering its wound, the hue that escapes
when grief and grace blend in a mother’s last glance.
These colours resist the cage of the spoke wheel,
drip outside lines, flood the sterile with life.
To celebrate colour is to treason the grid,
to let the untamed spectrum devour the lid.

-        Sivakumar Raman