Red is the Colour of Life
It’s the colour of cardinals, kings and queens, victory and death, and at this time of year, romance above all. Here alongside a photo essay, and wearing an installation made of live roses, poet and florist Hamish Powell writes about Red.
Images by Walter Zak
Florals by Hamish Powell and Jake Kuit
When celebrating victory, the Romans would wrap their bodies in red,
The Omo people too, to celebrate birth.
The Himba for beauty.
Mayans for sacrifice.
Four cultures of allopatry,
yet no stronger expression of emotion was found,
than to bathe in red and embody that energy.
“Better than black, worse than white” Say the Ndembu tribe,
Spoken ambivalence disproven by their newborn embraced in ochre.
“Untitled” Says Rothko,
leaving behind the highest bid stripe of vermillion in history.
It’s the first colour of the spectrum, the first colour in our perception,
caught between the red sun and the red planet,
with our red carpets and red herrings.
Our chromatic craving through these words is distinct
With red-handed red riding hood the red light district.
Sunrise or sunset, those gradients bordering the blue,
red will always seek to seep,
with scarlet splendour the skies are strewn
But before the hue, prowls the infrared,
unseen by human eyes but felt
on blushing cheeks and in between thighs.
Yet in sunsets the same as in autumn leaves;
this colour of light and fire and heat,
becomes harbinger of the cold and dark.
How can a colour, a shade, represent both love and hate.
Seduction and sin. Sex and solemnity.
In February, rouge lips and red roses, impress to undress,
by November, paper poppies are pinned to our chests.
From the cardinal to the carnal,
Monks in red robes aflame self-immolate,
With thorns of a red rose, my skin I punctuate,
Each prick it stings like a bullseye shot of cupid's arrow,
In the eye of the bull, you’re the matador.
You taunt and tease with your crimson cloth,
Expecting the red to engage my rage, but
I chase through my fear and confusion aligned.
Not just that, but most bovines are colourblind.
It’s no error in prose that eros and rose are anagrams of the same meaning.
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
But is it a rose,
when the cinnabar red from Van Gogh’s palette,
faces the fade that time has on that shade.
Before you reach for the cadmium red,
Which needs restoration - the rose or your head?
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,
Yet each bead on the rosary, is a rose you could be to me,
For I‘d crush a thousand cochineal
Just to kneel and replicate that lipstick I found on your skin.
But a thorn’s called a prick for a reason.
Red admirals and red cardinals, a colour steeped in
Creed and creation.
Christ in his blood coloured cloak. Or was it Wine?
When Queen Elizabeth would whine that people saw her unnoble,
the royal tailors introduced a new colour more focal.
Red dress and red coif,
The red hair was choice-less.
It’s the colour too of revelation and revolution.
La Révolution mille-sept-cent-quatre-vingt-neuf,
Women in rhubarb-red hats had enough and
Gathered around the blade.
Splattered in red, each rolling head
the fruit of their labour.
Furies of the guillotine, they were called.
Maybe that’s it, red is the colour of blood,
our life is held in this crimson venation.
Pain or passion, feeling is breathing,
To breathe in the layers of this pigment is to rise like a rose
Etiolating from shade into light.
It’s obvious now,
Red’s the colour of life.
