A color named Alice

Once upon a time, there was a color that had no name.

Noah is sitting under a weeping willow,

counting the droplets hanging on a cobweb.

In the schoolyard, his classmates play chase.

They tug at each other. They are called shouting.

Noah is an albino black child.

A spider climbs on his hand, then on the trunk.

And on the trunk the moss grows

and on the moss,

the reflections of light and the reflections of shadows coexist.

There is the fear of going to sleep,

the memory of crying, of an incomprehensible departure.

There's wonder for a firefly meadow,

for a new house with hot water from the faucets.

There is concern for Alice who is still in bed with a fever,

there is a desire for her to return to school soon,

there is a timid prayer so that Noah and Alice may remain friends forever.

Noah closes his eyelids. He reopens them.

His irises are so pink,

so wide open on the morning dew,

on the beauty that persists,

that there is room inside for any thundering storm,

for every slight unexpected rainbow.

The teacher taught Noah that green comes

from the yellow of the sun blending with the blue of the ocean.

But Noah immerses himself in the ineffability of the moss

and the green unravels in yellow and blue,

and in the unrepeatable brown of the trunk,

in the gray of the road, in the red of poppies.

Alice likes to ruffle Noah's hair.

They're funny, she says. They look like soft moss.

And then I still have to decide what color they are.

Inside the moss there is a color of dreams,

of one of those dreams that children have,

of one of those dreams that arise from the earth like chamomile flowers

and that make the sky fall in love with them.

Inside the moss there is a new color, still unrevealed,

there is a primeval color, whose name no one remembers.

It smells of those days when classmates will learn to be kind to Noah,

of evenings when the wardrobes don't hide the ghosts behind them,

but only white shirts, orange skirts, fragrant lavender t-shirts.

Inside the moss there is a color that is a small, defensible, elementary,

irreducible joy.

Once upon a time, there was a color that had no name.

Noah strokes his hair.

Noah whispers or hums something, smiling.

That color is now named Alice.