0293 Black, white, gray, color
Black and white are the magic of the drama
in the world of film;
gray, the poetry –
silver-gray of Paris; sunshine gray;
dark tragic gray of lovers’ partings
on the symbolic bridge, while the Seine
flows inexorably, darkly past like life and love;
who needs Casablanca in full color?
But there’s another gray –
the gray of exhaustion.
In 1945, a trip to London was a trip
to another race, of gray to unhealthy white
exhausted survivors, of the bombs
and doodlebugs and rockets,
of dead husbands, wives, sons or daughters,
broken marriages; bomb-shelter life drained of all emotion,
and almost too tired to welcome peace;
gray as the soot-encrusted buildings,
of smoke and London fog;
and Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’ which we had read
before 1939 as a vision of the new poetry
was now in 1945 a vision in the mirror
of what we were, of how it was; the truth of life.
Paper – so dangerously brought across the sea in war
from Canada, in ships sharked by U-boats,
bombs, torpedoes, was reserved for
the War Effort – propaganda, booklets
portraying the British countryside, the villages, we were fighting for;
and the occasional Penguin book on brownish paper,
of the dazzling white and crisp black contours
of the Modern Architecture
in which we all, we happy all would live – this earth,
this realm, this England, this jewel set
in a silver sea, this demi-paradise...
Corbusier would house us in the sky,
reclining in our Breuer chairs,
Gropius would cosset us,
our outhouse would be Bauhaus.. in
a paradise of black and white and gray
as they and we should be
and then, as we continued to snip
our ration books, ‘restrictions were lifted’ on some things,
and from America, that magic land, where
possibility had not died, one could order through the post
the lavish world of the colour magazine; and such things as
‘American Home’ came like a rainbow zapping
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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