What Is Your Soul's Color?
A Poem written May 2021
What is your soul’s color?
No shining, elusive Aura, outside…
What are you within?
Do you try to hide -
The ruby of pomegranate, of a
Thousand bursting seeds
Like the spilt red blood
Of sunset Nile through her yellow reeds
Like the warm rich silt below-
That inviting sandy bottom
that fish burrow to dream -
It is brown,
like a doe’s bounding back through forest shades of green.
Or are you like those two gleaming eyes …
a panther yet unseen?
Everyone a teeming multitude of colors
Shining inside, shifting outward
And more!
Are you a teal harbor’d boat?
The white-lined wood of a door?
A parrot’s laugh,
A dog’s smile,
the crow’s cowl…
a dark bull snake
winding through the moor?
What is your soul’s color-
Today? Tomorrow? Before?
Does it change, depending on what you have seen?
Or is it a constant tone underneath
The best kept, carefully cultured thing?
For me, Seasons come and go
They play across my face
Like all expressions that we know.
Of soft tones and harsh
Depending on my mood
They swirl and shift like
Clouds abroad a globe,
Or squeezed onto a plate like paints from their tubes
Left to run
And merge into streaks
Of colors mixed as they
Eddy around the drain.
What does not run
Is the core color of my soul
Guess it-
The pale pastel palette
Of a butterfly tornado
A hazy churning column
Of lazy light yellow
The soft frenetic pattern
Of a single one’s blitting
Through a meadow
Or a horse standing there-
The gentlest Palomino.
The sound it makes is my soul’s color too
The low nicker of a greeting, and the answered air of blue.
When I see the color of my soul
It is through this lens
Despite what has come and gone,
Despite all that happens…
Within me there is this soft light field
The little lazy butterflies
The horse’s dainty shake of head.
That is my soul’s color.
Can you think of yours?
Does it flow
Is it still?
Does it shade
Or light?
Or sing?
Or trill?
What sound are you and of what are you made?
I think on all of all the people, and of all that the people ever said
I think of all of all the wars
Fought, or lost, or “won”
I think of all poems written
And of how they have failed to grasp, and of how they have always begun
On each elusive core feeling
Of what we are inside
What is your soul’s color?
It is not something to hide.
About the Creator
Anna Cunningham
Longtime poet residing in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains
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