Lyrical Thursdays: This Is Just To Say

Today has been cold.  Really cold.  The kind of cold where you really want to be careful about sticking your tongue onto metal surfaces outdoors or you'll have a Christmas Story-esque experience.  (For the record, I think you might want to be careful about sticking your tongue onto metal surfaces outdoors like, any time of year.  Germs, man.  Germs.)  This image led me to start thinking about how, if your hand is wet when you reach in to get ice cubes from the freezer, the cubes stick to your fingers, which in turn got me thinking about ice boxes and sweet, cold plums eaten by someone sneaky, which is the basis of today's poem.

The poem, titled This Is Just To Say, is by William Carlos Williams and is also another I've used in a painting:

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten 

the plums

that were in

the ice box

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

Painting by yours truly - oil & mixed media
on 8 x 8" panel

For this painting I knew I'd have purple (for the plums), and wanted to play around with complimentary colors so I put a yellow in the background.  I also used acrylic gel medium mixed with white sand to get a snowy, icy texture in the painting over the collaged words, with the purple plum shapes floating over and under.  (Click on the image above for a closer look.)  Part of me always wants to go back and keep reworking the painting (this is the case with all of my paintings...), but I also like it the way it is.  (I'm not the first to create a painting based on a poem by Williams, but more on that another Thursday!)

One of the things that I love about this poem is how simple it is.  Someone had delicious plums waiting for them in the ice box - maybe they were saving them for breakfast when they really would hit the spot - and someone else ate them.  I can almost picture the words of the poem written on a sticky note stuck to the counter, to be found by an irate roommate in the eater's absence:

Of course Williams may have had different, deeper meanings to the poem, but I enjoy its apparent simplicity, the cadence of the words, and the picture they paint (literally and figuratively).  Others have also been inspired by Williams' words, and I'll leave you with an example that had me laughing on Twitter last week:

Happy Thursday!