I still walk into rooms lit only by silver  

and shadow, where the world was quiet enough  

to hear a screen door slap shut behind me  

and know it meant supper, not escape.  

In that grainy light, everything held still:  

the porch swing creaking under two bodies  

who had not yet learned the word “later.”  

The dog’s tail thumping one slow metronome  

against the boards, Grandmother’s laugh  

rising like smoke from the kitchen window  

and drifting out to meet the sage-scented wind.  

Black and white made it sacred, 

no garish distractions, no future bleeding in.  

Only the clean edges of what was:  

a hand on a shoulder meaning forever  

without saying the word, the windmill’s slow turn  

marking time against the wide, unhurried sky.  

I sit in the dark theater of my own skull  

and run the reel again, frame by frame,  

aching for the simplicity of monochrome,  

for the time when joy wore no color at all  

because it needed none to be felt.  

And then, slowly, the way light creeps  

under a door I thought was locked,  

a flush of rose along the porch rail,  

the dog’s fur warming to copper in the sun,  

Grandmother’s apron suddenly the blue  

of Delft tiles, the sky behind her  

no longer gray but a high, reckless cerulean.  

I blink. The reel keeps turning.  

The swing is still swinging, the door  

still slapping shut, but now the distant cattle  

carry a soft rust-red in their hides.  

The hills beyond the fence posts turn sage  

and amber, the grass at the edge of the yard  

pushing green through the dust of old summers.

It was always there, wasn’t it?  

The color. Not added later by memory’s hand,  

but waiting, patient, in every frame  

I once called black and white.  

I thought I longed for the past.  

What I longed for was the way I looked at it,  

with eyes that had not yet learned  

to trade wonder for worry,  

to let the light fall full and forgive  

whatever came after.  

Now the film flickers on,  

and I no longer reach to stop it.  

I let the colors spill across the screen,  

let them remind me:  

The good feeling was never locked  

in some faded reel.  

It lives wherever I choose  

to open my eyes and let the light in, 

even here, under this same wide sky.

© 2026 Peter Noah Thomas