One - Yves Klein Blue (John Christie)

Your book gave me Klein, also, thankfully

It gave me Matisse, and Yuri Gagarin

Won’t each layer of colour

On a flat surface 

Change both itself

And the colour beneath it

In the same way that geologists

Take core samples of rocks

Could we not have a sideways look

At the many layers of blue

And does not each layer

Allow the artist

Another hour of contemplation

To bring his blue to the surface

Then John, to light that plane

Which will now neither be

Flat nor true, yet we are able to imagine

A whole lifetime in that one colour

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Star Filled Skies - The Red Whose Father Is The Knife (John Berger)

At first reading I thought you were on speed

Or that you had taken one two many

Of your painkilling drugs

But then I let your words slow me down

I discovered a new wavelength

I saw, and felt, your continuum

From white, to red, to black

Exactly as it is in life John

From birth, to being, to death

Best of all though, you took me back 

Back to my childhood bedroom, where

Model aeroplanes hung from the starry ceiling

My father used to sit on my bed to tell me 

The names of all of the colours in the world

He was the first to give me Cadmium Red

He spoke of red being an emotional colour

Indeed the highest of the high emotions

Coming along, at the beginning, and end of life

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Scunthorpe Cemetery - Cadmium Red (John Christie)

A funeral is a good place to find colour

It stands out, ever so strong

Among the blacks, and the greys

And the nothingness of passing

Also John, as you were in a crematorium

You might imagine the fierce red flames

The painting of Vesuvius erupting could come to mind

You know, by that Earl of Derby chap

Is it carnations that don’t have any scent

I think a strong note is a good guide to colour

I have asked my paint shop man

To make me up a tin of Cadmium Red

I thought it might bring some life

To the alcoves in the study

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A Different Introduction

What a good day, the first Friday

In November 2017

The first blank page, in a new blue book

And so what to write about; well, next week

I go to Buckfast Abbey, in Devon

For a four day retreat

I will write while I am there

Profusely I hope

I will write in this book

But the poems

They may be published elsewhere

Under the auspices of Abbey Poems

I am having keyhole surgery

On my frozen shoulder

On the first Saturday of 2018

No doubt the build-up

The event, and the aftermath

Will generate some words

But will they be poetic

Last night, in our writing group

We responded to artists letters

Specifically those between John Christie

And John Berger, from their album 

I Give You This Cadmium Red

Proserpine

Proserpine
Your words I find
In the midnight mind
Searching for a peace of kind
A solitary recitation
Escape to meditation
Walking on sands of sedimentation
From the galleries of sensation
Tortured heart
Broken soul
Bare, on the gallery wall
Pain standing ten feet tall
Your sleep
Is my sleep
Your weeping
Is what I keep
Silently, slowly you slip away
Fade, fade, fade away
The flowers lose their colour
The trees lose their leaves
Silently, slowly you slip away
My tortured heart
A deck of cards, broken apart
By the midnight mind
The insomnia was overtaken
Travelled it seems so so far away
And now we are awakened
Our pain has been taken
We have left behind
All what was forsaken
Lost what I thought was mine
In the garden of Proserpine

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