crazypluralworld:

GEORGIA O’KEEFE

RED POPPY (1927)

Red Poppy

(from a painting by Georgia O’Keefe) 

‘The meaning of a word

is not as exact

as the meaning of a colour’

 

So she walks out of the rectangles

of hard, crowded America

and floods the skies over southern plains

 

with carmine, scarlet,

with the swirl of poppy-silk.

There is music in it, and drumbeat.

 

You can put out the sun with poppy,

lie in long grass with beetle and ladybird

and shade your eyes with its awnings,

 

its heart of charcoal.

Wine glasses held to candles

or your veined lids against the sun.

 

The waters open for a million years,

petal after petal in the thundering river,

stamens of flying spray at its whirlpool heart.

 

Red mountain where the light slides

through the beating red of every Texas dusk,

and dark earth opens in a sooty yawn.

 

She paints out language, land, sky,

so we can only look and drown in deeps

of poppy under a thundering sun.

 

Gillian Clarke

(via antelucanhourglass)