Dazed

a glass of wine
not mine
blood red
against white
linen
shimmers
with candlelight
stirs emotions
and baffles heads
makes us dazed
and confused
as someone once said
with one flick
of a napkin
the glass is dashed
white linen
adorned with rosy blush

Kim M. Russell, 5th April 2021

red wine in clear wine glass

Image by Edge2EdgeMedia on Unsplash

My response to dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille: In Praise of the Grape

Linda, our host for this week, begins her prompt with a quote from Ernest Hemingway about wine being “one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection”. My first response was this:

I bade goodbye to Bacchus long ago,
renounced the potent blood of grapes,
the pale and crisp, the honeyed glow,
blushing pink and cherry red escapes.

This was mainly because I have seen how potent it was for some of my friends and, remembering mistakes I made while drunk on wine in my youth, I very rarely touch it now, only on special occasions. But I can see its attraction.

The word for this Monday’s Quadrille, our 44-word poem, is ‘wine’, any form thereof, or even one we create that contains the word. Linda has shared a fascinating tidbit about wine windows in Florence, which she found out about from watching ‘Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy’. Here on the Norfolk Broads, a pub once sold drink and provisions from a window to wherrymen and holiday makers, so they didn’t have to leave their boats. She has also shared an extract from Shelley’s ‘The Vine Shroud’ and Poem 132 by Emily Dickinson, ‘I Bring an Unaccustomed Wine’.

45 thoughts on “Dazed”

  2. beautifully tight picture you gave us to drink in here Kim! an accident waiting to happen – the result is that sharp intake of breath and yet I also loved picturing the red on white

    p.s. coincidentally I was singing this today!

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  8. In college and the Navy, I did a lot of wine, and suffered for it. Alcohol is a poison to my system; haven’t touched it in 40 years.

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  20. White linen adorned with rosy blush! What a lovely description of a wine spill! 🙂
    Ah yes….too much wine, not a good thing….but I do love my glass of chardonnay each evening! I will say, I never write in the evening….the muse strikes most when coffee is at hand. It is silenced by wine. 🙂

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