A Good Home

by

Elizabeth Gowing

Email: elizabethgowing@hotmail.com

 

At the entrance to the potter's

folded unfired jugs with lolling necks,

a bowl that hangs its hare lip in shame,

a vase with a hernia in its gentle belly,

the pitcher whose ears were pinched too hard to last,

all the misfirings, half-baked

heaped slack here on the ground

as if an animal has slipped its young.

Inside, the potter sings

to the bowl he's making now,

cradling its faint fontanelles for fear it breaks.

His arms are spattered with clay, dark red

as though he's helped at a difficult birth.

Out of the womb darkness where he works,

I blink in sunlight,

clutching the pot I bought from him,

the one he said that's shaped to hold

the local live yoghurt or their blood-red wine.

At home in London it will stand alone, admired

in my smart sitting room,

mouth still wide open

to catch my city's dust.