Day 16: "Redness"

Here was the prompt for Day 16: "For today's prompt, I want you to pick a color, make that the title of your poem, and write a poem that is inspired by that color." Read more at: April PAD Challenge: Day 16

"Redness"

When the summer storm rose from an eastern sky
To us the west looked red
Roses of anger heaped on a bush stuck in its thorns
Smarting faces, hatred.

You were watching Caché in the living room TV
Blood squirting from a slashed up neck
Headless chickens scattered in an ungainly race
Backwards, forward, again back.

My finger touched a tomato skin shedding light
Of a red ink, darklike –
Wasn’t this what my father’s Opaar Bangla comrades
Brought in, a newspaper wrapped tight

So not everyone would know how words tumble
Red and angry on our roads?
I thought I saw a word flutter open again, a hue,
Not a name or mundane things like odes.

You thought we had lost our tongues, our attitude
Piled under the redness of shame
Peripheral to storms, deaths, news of constant ruse

And I realized, a color did not need a name.

Image from the Internet: Petrograd Red, 7th November, revolutionary poster depicting a Russian Sailor, 1919