Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Colors

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"Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways."---Oscar Wilde

"Let me, O let me bathe my soul in colours; let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow."---Khalil Gibran

"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart--the best brain."---Robert Ingersoll

                                                      Midweek Motif ~ Colors


Who wants a drab life or a colorless world? Imagine a monochromatic rainbow! We thank the sun all our life for the light, warmth and colors it brings to us. It's so sad that there are so many souls deprived of this gift of light and colors from birth.

Psychologists believe that in northern countries there is a large number of people who commit suicide simply because there is a prolonged absence of light and color due to the cold dark winter.

Sometimes our skin colors can become big issues even in today's world triggering discrimination.

Color may be synonymous to happiness. People paint their homes in happy colors to keep depression at bay.

Writers frequently use colors and its shades as symbols.

Nature displays Her colors magnificently throughout the seasons reminding us of birth, growth, decay and death.

What about the poets? Let's check out a few:

Domination of Black

by Wallace Stevens

At night, by the fire,

The colors of the bushes

And of the fallen leaves,

Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.

Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.

And I remember the cry of the peacocks. 

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.

They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.

I heard them cry -- the peacocks.

Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.

I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Letter in November

by Sylvia Plath

Love, the world
Suddenly turns, turns color.
The streetlight
Splits through the rat's tail
Pods of laburnum at nine in the morning.

It is the Arctic,

This little black
Circle, with its tawn silk grasses - babies hair.

There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.

It cushions me lovingly.

I am flushed and warm.

I think it may be enormous,
I am so stupidly happy,
My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

This is my property.

Two times a day
I pace it, sniffing
The barbarous holly with its viridian
Scallops, pure iron,

And the wall of the odd corpses.

I love them.

I love them like history.

The apples are golden
Imagine it----

My seventy trees
Holding their gold-ruddy balls
In a thick grey death-soup,
Their million
Gold leaves metal and breathless.

O love, o celibate.

Nobody but me
Walks the waist high wet.

Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.


Write a poem with "colors" today.

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community.

                                   (Next week Susan's Midweek Motif will be ~ Design)