Reflections on Gray

  by Kathy Cotton

I celebrate gray:
the pointy-head crayon standing tall and proud
in a first-grader’s box of used-up yellows 
and reds and peeled purple nubs.
The first prominent hair to stand out from its plain 
brown neighbors on a middle-aged head.

I extol the understated beauty of wolf and whale, 
old ashen faces, gravel wedged in my tire tread, 
soft melding sameness of overcast sky and ocean.

Above all, I applaud dull moon-rock, 
devoid of Mars’ spanking red dust 
and our planet’s cheerful greenery. 
This plain gray ball circling Earth whispers 
nightly its waxing, waning, universal secret:

The difference between gray and silver is Shine.

Deciphering the moonbeam message, 
I began to pan my streams, chisel my shafts, 
search city streets for gems of gray, 
just to set myself ablaze like a newborn star
and watch their dullness glow from my burning.  

For dingy skies, for smoke and mist and rain, 
for pain’s dark melancholy and the hoary head of age, 
I can fuel and stoke my heart to raging flame, 
consume myself in light, till any moon in my path 
becomes a mirror reflecting back

this hot, glistening heart. Now I can see your gray,
your sad, your bored, your dirty gray as 
burnished silver, sparkling tinsel, shiny foil, honed steel—
bright as all the best fire dancing in me.

When I shine, you shine.