Ten stanzas, thirty lines, and hardly a complete sentence: "Colours" is built from single words, like paint samples laid out on a table. But the samples tell a story. The poem begins with three plain colours (red, black, white) and ends with them blended into grey. Everything in between is about bodies, damage, and the slow drain of colour that time brings.
The structure is the first thing to notice. After the opening list of colours, the second stanza names their raw material in the same order: "Blood, / Ash, / Flesh." Each colour then gets two stanzas of its own. Red becomes "Maroon, / Crimson, / Scarlet," then "Shades of, / Vampiric, / Dessert." Black becomes "Charred, / Burned, / Blacken," then "Shades of, / Fire's, / Attack." White becomes "Skin, / Cells, / Bone," then "Shades of, / Our given, / Coat." The repeated "Shades of" is where the list stops and a sentence spills across three lines. Because each word sits alone, "Fire's" waits a full beat before "Attack" lands.
What makes this arrangement interesting is who owns each colour. Red belongs to the vampire and black to fire, both forces from outside, one hungry and the other violent. Only white is "ours": skin, cells, bone, "Our given, / Coat." The word "given" is quiet but important, suggesting a body handed to us rather than chosen. "Coat" makes it a thin covering we wear. The poem moves from the things that threaten to the fragile thing being threatened.
"Dessert" is the strangest word. As spelled, it is a sweet course at the end of a meal, which turns the vampire's red into something grotesquely relished, blood as a treat. It is also one letter from "desert," which would suggest a drained, empty landscape. It may be a deliberate pun or a slip, and the poem doesn't say, but both readings fit: something is consumed and something is left barren.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Most lines are one or two syllables, so every word carries heavy stress, and the effect is a slow tolling. The repeated three-word shape makes a pattern that the reader begins to expect, which gives the small breaks in it more weight. In the black section, "Charred" and "Burned" are past participles, finished actions, but "Blacken" is the base form, as though the darkening hasn't stopped. The "Shades of" stanzas also end without a verb, so they hang unresolved rather than closing like the lists do.
The last two stanzas change the poem's movement. "Colors, / Blending, / Fading" and "Darken, / Leaving, / Greying" use *-ing* forms that turn the static lists into a process still under way. The three colours merge, and the final word, "Greying," is the only colour the poem never names as a starting point. Grey is what remains when red's violence and white's fragility have both been drained away. It also brings ageing to mind, with hair and skin losing their colour, and "Leaving" can be read as colours departing or as people doing so. Even the spelling shifts, from British "Colours" in the title to American "Colors" in the body, which suits a poem about things blurring together.
The name attached to the poem echoes a famous farewell catchphrase. I can't say whether that was intended, but it sits well with a poem that ends in leaving and fading.
Its significance lies in how much it does with so little. It never states an idea about mortality. It lets a handful of colour words make the argument, and the reader assembles it: threats come from outside, the body is a borrowed coat, and everything vivid eventually dulls. It can be read in under a minute, but the pairing of stanzas and the shift in verbs only show up on a second look, which rewards rereading.