Red
Three poems and four photographs
Mother, tending. Don’t make a fuss. Her voice is sharp. Chlorine smell catches on nerve endings. My tears sting her face into a scowl. Rough hands wash the careless wound, red smoke falls into clean water.
Tail lights.
He closes the door
and moves to the window
overlooking the road
does not see the sun
set, or the thin moon
vanish behind clouds
only the stream
of white lights
turning red, red, red.
What's black and white and red all over?
Read the poem with a red pen to hand.
Note all the things
you could have done better,
if only you’d thought of it
first.
Laugh loudly
at Shakespearean witticisms
from the back row of the stalls
to let everyone know that
you
understand the joke.
When you sit in the Rothko room
arrange your face to look thoughtful,
as if you believe
that the gallery is hallowed
and the paintings, like windows in a chapel
lead only to the outside.
Pretend that the value
of this gift
isn’t measured in money
or blood,
and that white walls don’t leave you
marooned
here in the black.
These three poems (all written this year), are linked by the colour red, a short word for a long wavelength. Red is the colour of blood, of body and earth, grounded in physicality. It is the colour of flame and heat, of passion and anger. It is inescapably linked to interiority, of body, of self.
The third poem makes reference to the nine Seagram murals donated to the Tate Modern, they arrived in London on the day he died, lying in a pool of red. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rothko
https://www.tate.org.uk
"Red, yellow, orange – aren't those the colors of an inferno?" - Rothko
Photos taken with my phone, connected to the writing only by the colour red.