Poetry By Kelly Facenda

Gunilla G CC




Other Colors


It is another season without you. Forsythia sends its branches out, 
skinny petals opening for the sun. The world wakes suddenly yellow, 
just as you did, except jaundice means damage
and cell death. It is a false flower; an errant, invasive groundcover.

I think about all that you’ve missed, years now. 
Waxy, weedy buds cover the lawn, little canary teacups 
that fill with dew. Brave daffodils crown saffron despite 
the early morning chill. It’s not quite a fire, not quite a conflagration, 
but something paler, softer. Something to slip into rather than put out. 
Spring, your final season. 

That April, with yellow skin, eyes, and your beautiful face swollen by
steroids, you were courageous like the daffodils. You loved the lengthening 
light, and you’d ready your camera to once again capture birds – 
cedar waxwings, orioles, bluebirds – when they started their return.
If allowed, you would have discarded your color, dropping it like 
dried petals to follow bright into the summer, flower gardens and the 
coyotes of the far fields, deer under the mulberry tree and swallows 
feeding over the pond. You did your best to stay.

Yellow fades, and I find I’m waiting for other colors, like dogwood 
trees in bloom, white and pink blossoms with green centers. 
I wait for azaleas, outrageous in magenta. Day lilies, the cardinal flower, 
the grape hyacinth, beads of fragrant purple. 

In your urn, you’re quiet and gritty like sand. I know you’re waiting with me.

​


Kelly Facenda is a nurse living outside of Philadelphia. After a long hiatus, she is returning to writing, and her work has recently been published in Gandy Dancer. Her poetry primarily focuses on grief, mental health, and nature. She lives with her husband and daughters, and her spicy sweet cat Otis, in an old stone and stucco house. ​