The Dark Red Wind

"We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture." - Milan Kundera

Wiki says: Milan Kundera, born 1 April 1929, is a writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. Kundera has written in both Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; these therefore are not considered translations but original works. His books were banned by the Communist regimes of Czechoslovakia until the downfall of the regime in the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

The original as found is called Red Blood Splat by Vaakash
Cropped from the original found on Deviant Art - *click here*

The Dark Red Wind

That's when I heard you
say "rubicund" and wondered
if I could ever
measure myself by
your moonlit midnight standards,
the sudden display
of nighttime blue light,
and the whispering sumac
in the darker red
wind of ancient Rome.

March 4, 2010 2:21 PM

Webster says:
Rubicund: Ruddy or red, inclining to redness...(perhaps as a judicious mixture of wind, rain, and beer) from the Latin rubicundus coming out of ruber, red. The word red is ancient, of course and is unified throughout much of the Indo-European language streams in the red- through the rub- versions, the "r" beginning itself invariant. Thus "ruddy" also implying a kind of red. This color of all colors is as old as it can be, named as it is. An ancient tribesman living near the Caspian Sea would get the point of "red" quickly and would probably call red something very similar. All this is sourced of course in the fact that blood is red and so primary among colors in that very intimate way. The linguistic drift through the millenia is not large for that reason.