thoughts from the ceramics workshop

the first day of spring eludes us
while drab November malingers
at the workshop window

someone is back from the ski slopes
someone else is off to Berlin and her blog
another is missing from his station

with pewter splashes like a garland
her alabaster head is festooned
and waltzed aloft to the kiln shelf

the smell of wood friction
and meths with shellac mingle
carborundum grinds

the grecian urn deep veined
with fern relief is glazed with wood ash
on chartreuse underglaze

a porcelain seed, Fabergé egg
with seams standing proud
dries in the warming cupboard

your back arched in focussed labour
palm buttressing the clay on the wheel
slurry garnered and returned to reclaim

rose-stuccoed jug of crank slowly drying
coiled vessel with inside opened out
egg-shell blue-rimmed flutedmugs

transparent matt is stirred
a beech leaf is incised in wax
with fine scraffito tool on bisque

a blue-green bust emerges from its cast
the plaster crack ridged across her face
will wear to file pad and wet and dry

shellac filigree for foliage dries on the bat
resist against a water weathering
bathed to translucent thin

paper porcelain petals wait for glass fusion
poppies nod in memory of absent George
Gujarati heads turn in rainbow saris

a lost citadel grows in my head the while
vectors of bird flight cross the boundaries
freeing memories once trapped in walls

it’s snowing somewhere in the north

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