Rodney Swansborough's Blog: 14 of 2012 -

A Red Letter Day - just a day in red . . . .

Today's poem is one of my favourites, hence the colour

Red

by Ted Hughes

Red was your colour.
If not red, then white. But red
Was what you wrapped around you.
Blood-red. Was it blood?
Was it red-ochre, for warming the dead?
Haematite to make immortal
The precious heirloom bones, the family bones.

When you had your way finally
Our room was red. A judgement chamber.
Shut casket for gems. The carpet of blood
Patterned with darkenings, congealments.
The curtains -- ruby corduroy blood,
Sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor.
The cushions the same. The same
Raw carmine along the window-seat.
A throbbing cell. Aztec altar -- temple.

Only the bookshelves escaped into whiteness.

And outside the window
Poppies thin and wrinkle-frail
As the skin on blood,
Salvias, that your father named you after,
Like blood lobbing from the gash,
And roses, the heart's last gouts,
Catastrophic, arterial, doomed.

Your velvet long full skirt, a swathe of blood,
A lavish burgandy.
Your lips a dipped, deep crimson.

You revelled in red.
I felt it raw -- like crisp gauze edges
Of a stiffening wound. I could touch
The open vein in it, the crusted gleam.

Everything you painted you painted white
Then splashed it with roses, defeated it,
Leaned over it, dripping roses,
Weeping roses, and more roses,
Then sometimes, among them, a little blue bird.

Day 14 of 2012

-------------------------------------------------------------"Red Diva"

Kazuya Akimoto Art Museum

This art work has been done in my Upstairs Art

studio by one of the artists, Leanne Ward who I

have been mentoring for some 12 months. I purchased this work of Leanne's recently. It reminds me of the "Fauvists" art done early last century. The Fauvist artist I most admire is Van Dongen. One of his works is below.

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It is no coincidence that all the women in the art works in this section are all wearing red. It is such a luscious and sensuous colour to use, and in all these works adds such vibrancy and richness.___

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Weekend reading of the Sydney Morning Herald "News Review"
has once again has me feeling an eerie nervousness about 2012
The following article is very telling:

D-days for the Europe Experiment.

" Sixteen million people in the euro zone are unemployed and voters are becoming angry and disaffected as austerity bites. In Greece, poor people who are diabetics cannot get insulin, cancer sufferers are missing out on drugs and even paracetamol is in short supply. The Greek Orthodox church this week reported cases of parents abandoning their children into care because they could no longer afford to support them."

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In their New Year addresses, the French President,

Nicolas Sarkozy, said Europe was ''without doubt [in]
the gravest [crisis] since the second world war'', and
the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, said 2012
''would no doubt be more difficult than 2011''.

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"For some, pessimism has spiralled into utter despair. Across Europe, the number of people committing suicide has jumped. Figures published in The Lancet show the British suicide rate increased 8 per cent between 2007 and 2009. The Greek Parliament reported its national suicide rate rose by 25 per cent in 2010."

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But, as ordinary workers see the pension age

extended to 67,jobs disappear and workplace

rights eroded, an estimated 2800 bankers in

London are each earning more than£1 million a year.

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