The Day with Painted Streets

-Carin Rich

The morning opened like stained glass,

a circle of color poured onto asphalt,

faces and fish swimming in the same sky.

A green face blinked against the sun,

its mouth half-smile, half-question,

like it had just learned the secret of becoming.

My dog sat in the mandala’s center,

not guarding, not waiting

only being,

a white curl of breath in the geometry of light.

Children laughed,

their voices painted brighter than pigments,

while strangers bent low,

brushes dripping with borrowed rainbows.

Later, in the hush of an orange room,

a woman sat cross-legged,

hands hovering like wings about to open.

She drew silence from the air,

and the silence grew roots in us,

deep as the fig tree outside

whose bark carried the fingerprints of centuries.

The day smelled of salt,

fried dough from a stand,

and the impossible sweetness of hibiscus,

as though the ocean itself

had been perfumed for a festival.

And as evening gathered its shadows,

laughter clung to our skin

not as noise,

but as the faintest proof

that we had once been here,

alive in a circle of color,

under a sky that had agreed

to let us borrow its light.