Black and White

Sometimes I see in Black and White,
the color stripped out,
everything reduced to line and light,
to it’s essence,

something rawer perhaps,
reducing life to a film noire image,
all Bogart and Hepburn,
danger and romance,

I have never decided the wisdom
of this, whether my mind’s eye
and it’s odd glasses, not so much
rose colored as cinematic,

does me a service
in it’s constant creation of what might be,
or whether it is simply a liar,
preying on my desire.

About this poem

I walked down to the quarry this morning to take some pictures. But the light was not co-operating and the colors looked dull. No matter. My mind switched to black and white mode and I took a series of evocative photos that grabbed the bright early morning sun as it glared out from clouds.

And I ended up with pictures that don’t really show what I saw, but more, what I imagined. That happens more often than I can tell you, both in my photographs, and in my writing, where I create or recreate something in my mind or what is, or was, or I hope for, and to my amazement, something real comes out of it all. Not what I imagined, perhaps, but something amazing none the less.

But it would not happen without the imagination, which prepares my mind for whatever shows itself in real life, and gives me options, free flowing and readily at hand, to make something good, yet ordinary and forgettable, to something extraordinary and memorable.

Tom