I remember (the evolving awareness of scarlet)

I remember being unaware.

the day had a scent of carnations
scarlet as so many scarlet things
from blood to summer fruits.

but it was spring and the fruits
were only perceivable in suspended
gestures like so many expectations
caught in snapshots, which I remember
mostly in black and white, in spite
of the scarlet and the scent.

as for the unawareness, I remember
its ambiguous sharpness prodding
at senses which were much too young
and thus much too open, unreservedly open
like a simple eagerness to inhale and exhale.

in the colour as in the scent there were
beginnings and I remember their hums and their
clatters now blending and then clashing
as they made it through that opening
and all breathable air. songs, marches
feet, ears, mission, words, liberty, repression
confidence, fear, war, no more, union
and severance. promises – again the scarlet
of fruits – and premises – the scent of scarlet
which can be carnation but can be blood
blossoming from the end at the beginning
of each gun. I remember inhaling it all
and exhaling bewilderment, most of all.

then I remember the back of a car
and being numb. don’t breathe in
the flashlights, don’t breathe out
the night or the scarlet dash upon
that voice which you are not to hear
least of all bleed. don’t exist so that
you may exist. I remember fighting
the absurdity of an urge to laugh away
the blanket covering my numbness.

and I remember the pain in those feet
desperately trampling the absurdity of
my sensed urge and making my own
subliminal pain absurd. I remember
the urge, in the despair of those feet
to convey a suppressed urge to weep
and an awareness. the awareness of
a green light of hope beyond the scarlet
hopelessness in the night.

I remember being no one as I made myself one
with the floor under those feet and that blanket
in the back of that car, so that I could be.

then I remember becoming aware
and not quite knowing what to make
of the blood or the fruits. I remember
deliberately obliterating carnations from
scents inhaled and I remember pondering
on how much I still liked scarlet as a colour
even as I disrobed it from more than the skin
and ripening passions, to capture and yet
exhale all my nudity in more snapshots to wear
in black and white.

like those times that came and went
and which I remember with the awareness
of a blur of coloured pains and lessons
and no longer absurd urges “not to laugh nor
 to weep but to understand”(*).

but all the variants of scarlet within
the magnitude of change held in the scents
of blood and of the pulp of fruits ripened
from that day of my unawareness, so many
springs and summers and snapshots ago
are what, in the green light of being
and hoping, I remember best
today.

inhaling and exhaling, eagerly.

© 2006 Alexandra* ~ OneLight*®

(*) quote from Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza

for further readings on the April 25^th 1974 revolution, please go to: