A Meditative Challenge, Accepted & the Result- A Poem: The Blue Houses

 

Sramana Mitra is publishing a series on LinkedIn called Colors

to explore a topic that she cares deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. 

"I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it." 

She requested - urged - LinkedIn members to write what came to us as we viewed her paintings, to write what came to us based on our feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, what thoughts it triggered, in the dialog area. She was interested to see what stimulation these pieces yielded. On this day – Les Maisons Bleues, Umaria

 

 

 Les Maisons Bleues, Umaria | Sramana Mitra, 2020 

Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 6 x 9, On Paper

 

The Blue Houses

 

No longer true blue. 

A bluer than blue sky 

bleaches walls from blue to aquamarine 

to dried waterless blue shadows 

on pasty blue-ish whitewash. 

Blue houses shaded by sun-brightened thatch. 

Where are all the children? 

Inside, in the cool blue shade. 

Too hot a sun to stay out and play catch. 

Where are all the women and the men? 

At the river for water or wash, 

and in the fields working their scorched patch.   

-mARTa weller 7/29/2020

My thoughts on the painting are mostly presented in the above poem, however, I also took a leap and imagined that the country where these houses were situated was a hot country. A country where the languages spoken might include French. And even though I never took French in school, I figured Bleue was Blue and most of us know that maison means house. I also imagined Umaria was a place name - which sounded foreign to me - an American. After I wrote the poem I looked up the name Umaria and found it was a district of Madhya Pradesh and is the district headquarters of Shahdol Division in India. I felt pretty good about my thinking processes! I also was pleased with the poem I ended up writing on a relatively spur of the moment!