In a black-and-white world, everything is clear.
Contrasts are sharpened, shadows minimal.
And one knows for certain
What is good and what is evil.
In a yellow-gray world, we make our way by stumbling.
Eyes and hands glide across the yellow hemisphere:
The sun is yellow, dandelions are yellow,
Sunflower heads are yellow,
Fields ripe for harvest are yellow,
Yellow houses and yellow minutes,
Yellow journalism,
Yellow jaundice, yellow fevers,
Yellow booklets.
Canaries are yellow,
Blond-haired men and women are yellow,
Yellow-beaked fledglings—and their song
Pours out, yellow, from their yellow beaks.
Undoubtedly, despite some deviations, yellow is
The bright side
Of the yellow-gray world.
Things are grayer within the gray:
Clouds on the horizon are gray,
Branches are gray—and so are the crows,
Everything that turns gray in the wind and rain is gray,
Everything grayish and colorless,
Everything expressionless and faceless,
Gray stone, a gray daily existence,
Gray coats and gray propaganda,
A gray film, a gray cataract.
Gray creatures, gray wisps of mist
Within gray brain cells,
And the haze of stale air in the unventilated dwellings
Of the spirit—
Along with the gray hair of this weary Earth
Beneath a pandemic-shadowed sky. “Grey autumnal solitude,
And it grows ever more autumnal.”
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Author:
Lily of the valley (Pseudonym) (
Offline) - Published: October 15th, 2026 05:38
- Comment from author about the poem: The poem was created in 2020, during the pandemic. The photograph shows the autumn bank of the Lahn River in Germany, near where I live...
- Category: Unclassified
- Views: 9
- Users favorite of this poem: Paul Bell
- In collections: Chiaroscuro.
Offline)
Comments3
I like some photos in sepia they give an aged feel to the picture and hopefully in this case it can be put behind as merely a memory of the past. Nicely written it speaks of the dingy the depressing and the hard to discern the good from the bad. Nicely done my friend
Dear Soren Barret, you deserve a gold medal for reading and deeply understanding my poetry. Thank you very much!
It is my pleasure Durdica and you are too kind I can only put down what strikes me as I read it.
'Grey' undoubtedly did typify the pandemic period, and has left me as I recall an impenetrable fog without significant memories; although you have somehow retrospectivly bought detail to it. I find your picture's composition beautiful and real.
One postscript: It was the covid lockdown which sent me scribbling here.
Thanks for the reminder of a now fairly distant twist in my life.
Thank you for reading and for bringing my poem to life through your own experience. Poetry, it seems, is powerful after all—no matter how weak it might appear.
Ah, the pandemic, when a trip outside was like getting released.
We all began to appreciate nature, and I think before it ended, trees were probably sick of us hugging them.
Does remind you of natures healing qualities.
Thank you very much! I fully agree that the significance of nature grew in our eyes as we navigated the pandemic crisis. However, my poem points to the universal state of our world—to the pervasive, greyish-yellow nature of everyday life.
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