BardBliss: Yellow

Lilly sleeping in the window
right next to me as I write.

One of the aspects of the current secret/chapter in our book club book is how you are inspired. Paying attention to how this usually -- not always -- works for you can be important to your level of creativity. If you are aware of how inspiration hits you, what inspires you, you can just be more awake to your natural rhythms.

Thinking back over my own creativity, I realized that, though I am working in the medium of words, it all starts for me with intense images. Usually these images are painterly, meaning very vivid and unmoving. Brief moments captured in my minds eye.

All of my poetry begins like this, which makes sense. But the novel I have finished started with one image -- a woman in a bathtub surrounded by candles. Other novels for which I have plans are also image based -- one is an old woman, at the edge of a violent ocean, and her glove is floating out ahead of her.

From these images, I start constructing story. I wonder why the woman is in the tub or why the old woman is out in such a violent storm.

What is the moment of birth for your creativity?

Yellow

Our bedroom was
always yellow.
A happy sunshine
color just right
for the room of two
young sisters.

Whenever we moved
into a new house,
our room was painted
first thing
to match the faux
bamboo furniture
and the fields of flowers
bed spreads.

So all of our
bedrooms bleed
together into a stream
of yellow.
Though what I
remember most
is the black
of middle night.

I lay encased
in fear,
swallowed by
black.

If you awoke,
we did not speak.
I might hear
you cry.
I would put
my head under
my pillow,
wishing I could
stuff the down
filling deep into
my ears, deep
into my brain.

The yellow
was the story
we told
ourselves in
the light
of day.

--Christine C. Reed