by Elizabeth Scott

This is what brown must feel like.
It stops short of flowing like blue would
but it runs through your fingers grittily
and you can’t help but wonder
how this odd brownness could be the very cradle
in which life on land comes from?
And yet it does.
From the singular brown comes the multicoloured,
the flora and the fauna -
a vision of life in essence.
When we arrive at our final day,
it will be to the brown that we return.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Nothing feels more elemental.
So in the short time we spend emerged from the earth,
remember that we are in fact the same.
Whatever our structure or our shape or indeed our colour,
we all end up the same brown soil.