Chasing Red -- poetry by Sirjana Kaur

“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

- "The Summer Day," Mary Oliver

Out here, there is little color but green: the hills, the grass,

the uneven ground. Along the roads are towering pines

reaching up and up. When you look up from the ground

where we stand, everything points to the center of the sky,

domed and bending over us, and the world is small.

When you walk up the hills with me in the rain,

arm around my shoulder, it is even smaller. Along the beaten path

we are still younger than we pretend, acting like we know

what we want. Like the day you told me you liked wearing red

because it "made your eyes look pretty” and I thought,

that isn’t what makes you pretty. You with this whole wide world

waiting for you to chase after it and cup it within your hands.

When it gets dark early, we walk home together

through the mud and rain-slick grass. Catching raindrops and

spinning round the rusting poles of streetlights. Even

out of breath and trudging through the dirt we are something

incandescent. Your hair streaked with purple and my eyes

full of light. Sheltered by the towering pines, the after-rain smell,

the feeling of the other's hand gripped tightly. In every memory

we make of this world we are as beautiful as we always wanted,

and always were. In every memory we make of this world it is ours.

---

Sirjana Kaur is an Indian-American writer from Redmond, Washington. A 2024 National Student Poet Semifinalist, her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Eunoia Review, Hot Pot Magazine, and Everscribe Magazine. She’s a lover of crosswords, cappuccinos, and the em dash.