Pottery

The Seattle post . . .

The Kiln
by David Keith Johnson

The literate leaning is not a pen of pens,
it is a matter of matters.
      Excavating shards — one assembles them,
             assembles and resembles them.
One wets the clay to work it again,
and kneads it firmly as the wheel is turning,
  then to the kiln at sunrise for the burning.

The sun is up and I am at it, 
  to the kiln at sunrise returning.

The London riposte . . .

The Fingerprint
by Kenneth Durham Smith

“Around 3000 B.C., a potter in what’s now Scotland’s Orkney archipelago left a fingerprint on a clay vessel.” The Smithsonian magazine, April 27, 2021

The Specialist
Ninety thousands shards and counting,
to be photographed multiple times,
bathed in different angles
and intensities of light,
to be combined and viewed through
the specular enhancement of the RTI

The Potter
Each pot has to be built, each coil
smoothed down onto the one below,
each pot taking multiple days,
each day which pot needs what done,
each day my hands bathed in clay

The Dig Director
If we’re lucky, when we dig down,
we find walls and infer buildings,
from buildings we infer their use,
from use how they were lived in
and from that who lived in them
We build ghosts and as we walk the ruins
we hope to hold their hands and catch their eye

The Specialist
Sometimes the shards join together
and I can rebuild the pot, in part,
enough to see and know the shape,
to guess the weight and heft and size,
even to imagine the hands that shaped it.
The pots survive more than the people

The Potter
This dawn is strange, I feel minds
reaching towards mine from out of the fire.
The feeling does not go away.
I take a still soft pot and press
my finger into the soft clay
just under the rim and make my mark
After it is fired I will break it,
toss its pieces on the midden,
one piece of many a greeting across time