February - Chasing Rainbows

This month we brought a little light and colour to into the room: pictures with rainbows by Brain Hatton, Patrick Hughes (above Wet Rainbow) and David Cox. 
Here are some of the results -

Rhian

Wet Rainbow

Rocking, cradled

Across the clothes line

In isolation,

Nowhere else to go,

Battling beneath the peg

Overpowering you

Winding you up as you wrestle

Rain and searching sun

Overhead, between

You must keep your promise

Gazump into action!

Brave the elements!

Identify yourself,

It’s vital that you are

Vibrant, victorious.

ROYGBIV by Mark

Roy did not consider himself an old man but he knew that he was no longer a young man. However, it did seem like a century ago when the kids in the playground used to taunt him with his nickname "Rainboy". Every school kid knew about Roy G Biv as a way of remembering the colours of the rainbow. All except Mr and Mrs Biv who seemed to be the only exception having named their son Royston Graham Biv.

Now, nearly half a century on, Roy sat on one of the benches ouside his local pub just as the rain had stopped. His namesake frowned down at him from the sky - a colourful frown but nevertheless a frown.

Roy had always wondered about the paradox of the rainbow. A symbol of peace and at the same time of false hope. The rainbow after the flood waters has receded and the notorious crock of gold promised but never found. He sat and considered this. He had certainly never found gold. He was not a rich man and never would be but today, right now, in the fresh rain-cleaned air, he began to feel the floodwaters subsiding. The pressure and mayhem of the last few years receding and a sense of peace surrounding him.

Mark 
Acrostic - Rainbow - Based on an unfinished painting by Brian Hatton

Riding close to the sky
Aware was Hardy, of a thing, brilliant white which should not be here
Indifferent was His mount, as if She knew it, was part of it
Nothingness He thought, surely a gap in the sky.
Back to it someday I'll go She thought. He is unsettled
Out of place, He remains puzzled and frightened by it
What is to Her natural, to Him is something not of this world

The unfinished Brian Hatton painting shows a horse and rider with an incomplete rainbow - just a white streak. Very striking.

Hilary reminded us of a wonderful poem by Louis Macneice Prayer Before Birth, which includes the lines:

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

From Sam we have these two pieces-

Snow falls in the river.

Icy artefacts

splintered from hard sky.

Descents angled and sped by cold winds.

Soundlessly slicing the river's surface.

Crystaline beauties

melted in a moment.

And:

Two people stuggling to remember an unfinished painting by Brian Hatton.

Sam

A: Remember the rider? Clinging to his horse in the rain?

B: Only that he rode. My memory is watery on the details.

A: Young. He was young, but hunched like he was old and cold.

B: Green. I remember the hill was green; it must have been Spring.

A: Brown. No, the hill was brown; the year was dying.

B: In the sky was a rainbow. Remember the rainbow hanging in the sky right by the rider, but he didn't even seem to know it was there?

A: Vividly.

Dickens is in the air at the moment and of course he has a word (or 10) to say about rainbows. This sunny description comes from the American Notes -

Warm weather! The sun strikes upon our heads at this open window, as though its rays were concentrated through a burning-glass; but the day is in its zenith, and the season an unusual one. Was there ever such a sunny street as this Broadway! The pavement stones are polished with the tread of feet until they shine again; the red bricks of the houses might be yet in the dry, hot kilns; and the roofs of those omnibuses look as though, if water were poured on them, they would hiss and smoke, and smell like half-quenched fires. No stint of omnibuses here! Half-a-dozen have gone by within as many minutes. Plenty of hackney cabs and coaches too; gigs, phaetons, large-wheeled tilburies, and private carriages — rather of a clumsy make, and not very different from the public vehicles, but built for the heavy roads beyond the city pavement. Negro coachmen and white; in straw hats, black hats, white hats, glazed caps, fur caps; in coats of drab, black, brown, green, blue, nankeen, striped jean and linen; and there, in that one instance (look while it passes, or it will be too late), in suits of livery. Some southern republican that, who puts his blacks in uniform, and swells with Sultan pomp and power. Yonder, where that phaeton with the well-clipped pair of grays has stopped — standing at their heads now — is a Yorkshire groom, who has not been very long in these parts, and looks sorrowfully round for a companion pair of top-boots, which he may traverse the city half a year without meeting. Heaven save the ladies, how they dress! We have seen more colours in these ten minutes, than we should have seen elsewhere, in as many days. What various parasols! what rainbow silks and satins! what pinking of thin stockings, and pinching of thin shoes, and fluttering of ribbons and silk tassels, and display of rich cloaks with gaudy hoods and linings!

And I've got to include a stanza from Tam O Shanter about our fascination with ephemera and our need to seize the day!

But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white--then melts forever;
Or like the borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow's lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm.
Robert Burns,
Tam O'Shanter