The Year I Began to Wear Red
By Michela A. Costello
Orange used to be my favorite color. That is, until
the Catholic priest in the Protestant town told me
I’d better watch it when I went running
in my marmalade exercise pants.
Green was the color of our faith. The shade
of newness and freshness. But we were in the heart
of sectarian schism – the East End of Glasgow.
So, he warned, stay away from green too. Don’t stand out.
And a decade later I thumb at photos of a naïve me
posing against a graffitied wall, those dirty streets
where we thought we were saving the world. I smile
behind woolen layers of sad blues and ambivalent browns.
Inside, a bullet hole in my bedroom window.
Outside, a gray dreich that spat everyday,
scattering cigarette butts and Nestle wrappers on the
weary sidewalk. Every corner an unanswered question.
All the fear that year. Nothing grew.
A verdant Scotland veiled by smoky city strife.
I sift through my diary from those days of jaded
hope but steady faith. A time when I learned to trust:
we must hold on to something older than decades of hate
we didn’t begin. Look for an answer, small but bright,
like the candles that burned in that crumbling church
on Millerfield Road. Something that says:
How do you carry light into a damp world
without making your own visible?
——
Michela A. Costello is an English teacher and writer in Washington, DC. Her work was most recently published in Poetryfish. She is an adjunct professor in Freshman Composition and is also pursuing her MFA.
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