Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Colour (Color)

Color effect – Sunlight shining through stained glass onto carpet
(Nasir ol Molk Mosque located in Shiraz, Iran)

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.”― Alice Walker

“One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.”― Virginia Woolf

"ME TOO" by Annell Livingston:
"Hold the world as tenderly as a lover."
(Used with permission.)

Midweek Motif ~ Color (Colour)

Working on this prompt is brightening my world! Today, I share words from Annell Livingston who created the "Me Too" acrylic painting above:  

I have been studying color for over fifty years.  And color is like exploring a cave deep underground, the doors or passageways keep opening, just when you think you have a handle on the subject, another door opens and presents new possibilities.  We begin with the hues of color, or the names of each color, like red, yellow and blue.  The lights and darks of color, tints and shades.  The temperature of color, warm or cool.   And the intensity of color, or the brightness or dullness of color.  There is so much to explore about color and its vibrations, it is a lifetime study.

Today, I'm inviting us to question how color around us shapes our moods and how our moods influence our environments.

The Challenge:  In your brand new poem, reveal the color of a place or an event.

Angostura de Paine, Chile. By Ricardo Hurtubia

The Art Room

BY SHARA MCCALLUM

for my sisters

Because we did not have threads

of turquoise, silver, and gold,

we could not sew a sun nor sky.

And our hands became balls of fire.

And our arms spread open like wings.

Because we had no chalk or pastels,

no toad, forest, or morning-grass slats

of paper, we had no colour

for creatures. So we squatted

and sprang, squatted and sprang.

Four young girls, plaits heavy

on our backs, our feet were beating

drums, drawing rhythms from the floor;

our mouths became woodwinds;

our tongues touched teeth and were reeds.

(Used with permission of the poet.)

First appeared in Song of Thieves 
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003

Colors passing through us

BY MARGE PIERCY

Purple as tulips in May, mauve

into lush velvet, purple

as the stain blackberries leave

on the lips, on the hands,

the purple of ripe grapes

sunlit and warm as flesh.

Every day I will give you a color,

like a new flower in a bud vase

on your desk. Every day

I will paint you, as women

color each other with henna

on hands and on feet.

Red as henna, as cinnamon,

as coals after the fire is banked,

the cardinal in the feeder,

the roses tumbling on the arbor

their weight bending the wood

the red of the syrup I make from petals.

Orange as the perfumed fruit

hanging their globes on the glossy tree,

orange as pumpkins in the field,

orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs

who come to eat it, orange as my

cat running lithe through the high grass.

Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes,

yellow as a hill of daffodils,

yellow as dandelions by the highway,

yellow as butter and egg yolks,

yellow as a school bus stopping you,

yellow as a slicker in a downpour.

. . . . 

(Read the rest of this marvelous poem HERE.)

Colorful fall foliage in New York.

In a London Drawingroom

                          BY GEORGE ELIOT

The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke. 

For view there are the houses opposite 

Cutting the sky with one long line of wall 

Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch 

Monotony of surface & of form 

Without a break to hang a guess upon. 

No bird can make a shadow as it flies, 

For all is shadow, as in ways o'erhung 

By thickest canvass, where the golden rays 

Are clothed in hemp. No figure lingering 

Pauses to feed the hunger of the eye 

Or rest a little on the lap of life. 

All hurry on & look upon the ground, 

Or glance unmarking at the passers by 

The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages 

All closed, in multiplied identity. 

The world seems one huge prison-house & court 

Where men are punished at the slightest cost, 

With lowest rate of colour, warmth & joy. 

In the Bois de Boulogne by Berthe Morisot (1880)

Pied Beauty 

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Glory be to God for dappled things – 

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

                                Praise him.

🌈

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

(Next week Sumana’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Treasure)