Friday Poetry: My Yellow Is Your Green

My yellow is your green,
my room your house.
And my mind,
my mind is a palace
whose inhabitants
have long deserted it,
refusing to return.
And only memories haunt the rooms,
Sunlight a distant dream away.

Written in response to Farideh Lashai's oil-painting, Circa 1960s; seen in Harper Bazaar Art Arabia's edition

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When I was younger, I constantly used to write poems inspired by paintings or photographs or any other source of visual inspiration; I wrote about Japanese pagodas after having glimpsed them in a calendar hanging in my uncle's home or a poem called Chimera in response to a painting I had seen in a magazine. To see and to write were almost synonymous for me and it most strongly manifested in my poetry. Once I stopped writing poetry, I began to manufacture images instead and stopped writing in response to visual stimuli. However, thanks to Instagram, I began writing in response to my own images and it soon spilled over into my poetry. Hope to have more of these art-poetry juxtapositions over here!