I photograph, in close-up, the fruit of a large, white poppy that has shed its petals. It is a little sinister.The greenish hemisphere of the ovary is divided into 12 equal sectors by the dark brown ridges of the stigmas, like miniature hedges radiating from a central node. It's like a bomb containing seeds and, though it's not that sort of poppy, it could be; and would then contain the white juicy substance, the basis of opium, heroin, the lot. It could be a symbol or a logo, standing for something at the same time beautiful and ugly, perhaps planet Earth and its inhabitants.
In the WI Market I buy a tall lobelia, with dark almost purple leaves and scarlet flowers. It now sits in a flower bed by the front door next to a delicate, grey-leaved fuschia.
For a dish planned for tomorrow's guests, I cut big, shiny leaves of ruby chard (bright red stems and red veins in the leaves) and even bigger, green leaves of white stemmed chard. In separate jugs, they look magnificient and bend and twist in the light. They, like the poppy, will pose for photographs. But how different they are!
2 comments:
Interesting - I hadn't read this when I put the photograph of the poppy pod on 'Compasses' - I too was intrigued by their precision and rather sinister form, and the one I used was stained and decayed, but mre textural for that.
I'm sorry that I didn't refer to your photo which illustrates poem 15. Your poppy seed is almost bronze and looks sculpted, (as you say it was stained and decayed). The compostion of the picture is almost abstract. It is very different from the one I photographed, which was green and sinsister in a different way.
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