Red Appears On The Scene Poem by Denis Mair

(in response to a painting by Chaled Res, dated Jan.7,2024, titled 'AND Love...')
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

This is scenery in which red is fated to appear. This is an everyday prophecy known in the bones of all.

Even passion learns resignation and takes on characteristics of soil.

Even aspiration mounts by the telling of words in a column of everyday air.

In a time of trauma, I saw the painter return to his studio.

I saw the festival colors, and the strokes were flexing with strong urgency to tell everything worth living for.

They waved and whirled together buoyantly for a time, but because they were bearing life's messages, they inevitably took on weight,

and so the strokes became an intricate tangle that looked clotted, down there in the muck tainted with blood.

I began to fear further descent into twisted shapes and lurid hues of emotionalism, for that would be the end of all celebration.

Thankfully, I saw the painter still clambering along his unending scroll.
Just when the lacework of strokes was about to become tormented,

he pivoted and painted the neutral fact of each color's history;

he pivoted and painted the lurid light as a medium for colors to rant at each other;

he gave them hues of organs negotiating their physiological roles in a dream,

and now he brings them into rapprochement; he gives them a role, to be part of a scene,

Their individual assertions and flirtations with darkness are irrelevant to the game they will play.