“A shade of white will be the defining color of the next year.” —The New York Times, December 4, 2025
“A lofty white
whose aerated
presence acts
as a whisper
of calm
and peace
in a noisy world.”
Let us blank
out all the noise
the alien rhythms
the clashing, chaotic colors
of the needful, striving world
The many shades of browns and blacks
(containing all colors, muddled, mongrel)
are too confusing to distinguish
so let them be bleached or thrown away
leaving us uniform, monotone, pure
This is our ideal: nothing at all
no mark upon your page
no disturbance in your minds
the white of the vaporous clouds
of the snow, burying all in stillness
Do not call it blindness
it is merely the absence of anything to see
and so this is our choice for the Color of the Year
and the next, and the next, this white
ever more perfect, more perfectly… nothing
Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.
