Rothko’s White Centre

Rothko’s White Centre

He gives us a perspicuous flat-plane moment;

Blocks of colour for humans to make a dwelling place;

The black water suits the soil for ploughing and planting;

The golden sunlight swells the green pea in the pod;

The pink lavender is the spring of contemplation;

In the pink and rose there is the festival of first fruits

Here we heed a call to return to existence,

Finite beings with double awareness who

Face the task of being heroically alone;

Who must return to the home of necessity;

The emblems of honest need are fragments of sacrament;

He frees us to sing the psalm of many colours;

To cut a hole through the ice and see the deep;

To dry ourselves from a drenching of the sceptical;

To turn our faces from the flickers on the back-lit cave;

To wonder when the warm light filling the ears of corn

Stirs the sheaves to wave at the liquid sickle sun,

To honour the salty reapers who with bent spines gather grain;

To leave the forgotten sheaves for hungry neighbours;

The white is the salt of the plated offering

That replaces blood sacrifice eight days after creation;

It is also the unhusked flour that makes our daily bread;

It tells us we can be at home everywhere with everyone;

Here Stan might dance as melodiously as Fred;

For all the tap-tap syllables of colour say ‘I exist’

Lear would not have cudgelled Cordelia to hear her love;

It is miraculous that a gleam of light in the brain flashes sense;

It is miraculous that a painting can the day after mean at all;

The miracle is he enacts the theatre of finite human belonging;

The miracle is the silence is so accurate because it risks adventure;
You ask, How should I live? What do I owe others?