Collect Art Publication July 2023
First published in Collect Arts Summer 2023 edition
Stone all the flowers
The year of the art school tutorials.
The difficult woman you are to me, and the difficulty I present to
you.
The year of my recovery and your husband’s death.
Your husband fails and worsens through the days of our trimesters
together.
As he weakens and declines, I grow incrementally stronger.
As if terrible fatalistic scales of balance, set and reset.
Do not cheat her. Give her a full measure of time and experiences
with him.
Pressed down, shaken together and overflowing.
She, in the face of all this decay
Chooses to destroy flowers with stones.
Until their purple hearts stained the cartridge with their
elemental pigments.
She cuts the flowers only to waste them in the parching sun.
It is the cycle of being and unbeing, the grass withers and the
flower fades (Isiah 40:8).
She decides to press her flowers till their lungs burst on fine
cotton Lawn.
Flower torture continues all summer at a scale unknown.
Vast swathes of meadows of flowers fall.
A thousand at one side of her, ten thousand at her right hand,
(Psalm 91).
mown down, with her scythe of doom.
She greedily gathers the quiet fast lives into her hands.
Takes their lives as easily as shutting a book.
Turning off a machine.
Leaving the room and turning out the light.
I too am but a breath on a summers morning.
My days fleeting as a shadow across the sun (Psalm 44:4).
As summer wears into golden-close-autumn,
Her husband wilts and droops, becoming cloudy
losing his colour, it is all too late
even freshwater cannot revive him or save his life.
His water is drained and he is sent back to the earth from which
he came.
While I become myself again.
Remembering the time of the stoning of the flowers.
Photo by Kristine Cinate on Unslapsh. IG account - @ziemelu_kristine
The pots and pans sit in greasy plies, as Sister Many-Furs of
Grimm’s tales fame
Rolls up her sleeves and get to the washing up.
How diligently she works in her rags, knowing all the while that
really, she has a walnut shell.
Inside is a dress of moonlight, a dress of the sun and a dress of
starlight.
With these costumes she has all kinds of plans.
Parties to go to, people to meet, a future to forge towards, in
freedom.
Escapes to hatch and execute.
Her walnut in hand, her disguise in place she melts into the
background of the kitchens.
Biding her time, thinking things through, Seeing the lay of the
land.
Absconding from an incestuous father was step one.
Getting a spot by the fire, a job and some cash stowed away that
was step two.
Even if it is just washing up at The Palace.
She is an independent woman, with means and motivation of her own.
The washing up is a place marker,
a means to an end.
Standing by the sink for two, four, six hours washing up after a
palace feast.
George Orwell did it,
for the price of freedom.
.....................
Torque
The image is quite abstract.
Colour palette in 1962 modernist.
Tangerine, mint green and chocolate brown.
The jeweller – a young version of my mother, is in the shot.
Cropped so that the necklace she is working on, a geometric torque
is held up.
Her face framed but blurry in the middle distance.
Her Quant bob a bit of a straw mess, as ever.
Her eyes hidden behind Binomag Loupe Binocular glasses.
It is all very Space-Race.
In the ether I can hear the blow-torch hiss and burn blue,
emitting the smell of natural gas and rubber.
Touch again the gritty surface of the bench, the Peg,
the suede drop cloth glinting with gold.
She, frame within frame, is remembered in this moment, in
this time.
Destined for the Sunday Colour Supplement.
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