Frances-Ann Norton: Poetry

 Angel Andrea - charcoal drawing on cartridge, A1, Frances-Ann Norton It is wonderful to be working with instagram@alicemaryjelaska once again in the Pop-up-space Hackney, Mare St, London. for an exhibition of visual art and poetry in February 2024. The theme was Tea and Friendship.  Angel Tea   The pictures on my phone divide into days, events, trips, workshops. Important, in-focus ones are instagrammed, facebooked and tweeted.   What about the in-betweeny photos? The ones that are unchosen, abstract, blurred, accidental handbag shots. These need further study, they are more than they first appear, less than rejects. They represent moments of autoethnographic honesty, unheard dialogue, fear, tears, tech-impatience or pure love. So interesting and to be banked for another day, a future art-investigation-project. When I seek to unravel and analyse these images, make meaning out of them… I see the visitation of the Angel of Communities, in the corners and on the edges ...

 Forget me not press #6 Feast St Pio for Tea Lovely to be included in this Canadian Poetry zine.  Apple Feast   Quiet lived day, little flowers of happiness. The time to sit on this autumn morning looking out of the window at our garden. The blackbirds are here again and a small family sit on the garden table. A feast of windfall apples I have laid. Slowly turning from yellow to red to brown.   Daily small pecks appear on some of them as the blackbird take their fill of fruit. The pecking and eating gets deeper into the apple so they become translucent as eggshell. Hollowed out, firefly candle glow, warmed from the inside by the autumn sun. And my thought. I was glad to have gathered these fruits as feast for the birds.  

  Kintsugi    I see myself stockpiling useless rubbish, broken and disintegrating bits. I do not need them. I must simply let them go. Boxes of broken sculptures are holding me back. I am the deconstruction, I have ruined myself, and I cannot be fixed easily. I begin confidently saying to myself, “I can fix it… I can mend it”… but this is untrue. Only the Great I Am can repair this broken thing I have become. Only They can mend the un-mendable, redeem the irredeemable, fix the unfixable. In my brokenness, in my weakness, in my fragmentation, I have a strength in the hope that the fragile knot of time can be undone, then strongly reknotted. The Author of the Universe is the artisan craftsperson who is creative and inventive. They mend with slivers of gold in the Kintsugi way. The golden repair, the golden join, making me whole again. Making beauty out of an undoing. Perhaps I am never going to be ready or fully comprehend this gift. Bu...

Blackbird Egg Time slows down in the Victorian mirror. She is haunted by every face that checked themselves in the glass. She is on the cusp. A life about to begin in earnest, on the tipping point of adulthood. On the apex of future relationships, sexuality and desire. “Yes” she says, “that’s me in the mirror”, long brown hair, grey-blue eyes. She is just an ordinary brown bird. But common or garden blackbirds create sky eggs, objects of beauty and desire. Each one speckled slightly differently in the genus. If only she can create of herself such an object of yearning, her small brownness will be worth the transformation. On the Hall-stand crafted in a grand antique style, are a collection of blackbird’s eggs. Saved in small glass containers with their lids tight shut. Through the glass she sees pale blue specked eggs, broken with raggedy edges. The armoire ominously overshadows her slight fourteen year old self. Whom she sees reflected back in multiple mirrors, framed in the warm glea...

  Delighted to be published in:-  https://www.cistaarts.com/product-page/chapbook-series-3-gone-with-the-wind Learning craft from the wind   There was once a woman. Who learned craft from wind, art from the sea and design from the earth. She sewed intricate organic patterns in labyrinthine repeats. Her creativity was celebrated through the land. She was known as La Corachine, beautiful shell of the sea. Her daughter Powys was as natural as the elements, precious as comfort and radiant with gold-nature. One day an old woman coloured like an autumn day came to their door. “I want what is yours.” She said, and stuck a pin into the girl, who transformed into a brown-bird and flew off. “Old woman”, cried the mother, please cook a meat and potato pie for us. “Of course”, she sang, catching the brown-bird-daughter. And made her into a pie with potato skins. The leftover bones she threw into a corner of the garden. In three days, a beautiful tree g...

 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 co...

  Delighted to be published in: Chapbook #5. Confronting the unknown:   Bridges By Frances-Ann Norton   Her story is a molten mirror, white hot with reflected truth. Her almost-escape haunted her. Reliving it at odd quiet moments in her monotonous day at the production pottery. She had nearly been free, changed forever. Her hand was on the car door-handle as the light turned from green to orange to red. It was a turning point but she did not turn, a chance not taken. This time.   Later at work surrounded by bisqueware, she sobbed for an hour in the dust. Her escape-plan, her dream lover, was an illusion, beautifully cooked up. She was an automaton, every emotion tamped down. Feeling was dangerous. In the studio signing pottery in rich red oxide and then dipping the bases in boiling wax, She stood there like an Egyptian hieroglyph, arms raised above the hot wax, pot in hand, thinking. Piecing out her story until it reached this ...