The Mill

Poets United: Midweek Motif…Colors
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The Mill

Rests on a hill somewhere
at back of my mind.

Each day haul my hand cart
up that hill, filled with ideas.

Feed those ideas into machine
and it spits out black and white
designs:

some of which make my fingers twitch,
creating an itch to reach for colors that
will fill their empty spaces, bringing
their faces into clearer definition.

Then one day, as I climbed that hill,
a question came from that moving stillness.
What would happen if I fed the colors first,
let them burst and redefine the process?

So, I did it. And in utter amazement, finally
found face of that ramshackle mill that rests
on a not too distant hill, somewhere in my mind.

Elizabeth Crawford  12/9/15

Notes: Have wanted to write about my process of discovery with lines and colors for some time. Happened on The Midweek Motif this morning and knew exactly what I wanted to do. It took more time, gathering up all the pieces and parts than it did to write the poem. Lucky for me, someone had asked me, just a few days ago, to explain to them how I got into all of this pen and ink drawing and coloring. And of course, here I turned it into a rather delightful mythic experience. The machine of which I speak is a digital kaleidoscope app. The first image is a pen and ink doodle of repeat pattern drawing. The final image is a water color wash using water color pencils and then doing the pen and ink line weaving over it.