Guest Poem by Dinah Livingstone

Dinah Livingstone had a country childhood in the West of England and has lived in London, Camden Town, since 1966. She has written several prose works and is a translator with a special interest in Latin American writing. She edits the magazine Sofia and runs the small press Katabasis. She has received three Arts Council Writers’ Awards for her poetry and published 9 pamphlets and 9 books of her poems. Her latest collection is The Vision Splendid (Katabasis, London 2014). Web: katabasis.co.uk/dinah.html

Rose Garden

I see things in black and white, he says.
He means he sees them plainly with a will
proudly to describe the truth in prose
and strip away the fantasy and frill.
Red rose of passion, yellow rose of peace,
the flaming orange and soft violet
stir feelings as they feast the eyes and nose,
while the associations they create,
the dreams and poems, fill the memory.
Life consists of more than gradgrind facts
and isn’t monochrome but colourful.
Each person with each other interacts.
To miss, dismiss, all that fails miserably,
myopically, to apprehend the whole.