I leave the home I love
By the canal
With its homely pots
Not knowing I am
To meet you here
Through yours.
Your blessings vase
Rises from near black to mossy green,
Then intended purple of flowers
And happy accident of light and shade
Falling on vase and walls
Like tree shadows on water.
I hear and see your love for your home town,
White walls, black tiles and green moss,
Black bereted boatmen on the canal.
I feel at home in the endless cycle
Of black to green to black,
In the familiar striving and finding,
Then striving again for the perfect shape.
I feel at home in the clay in your hands.
I also walk by the greens and blacks of a canal.
Today, I imagine arriving
Not in Bath but in Shaoxing,
And realise that I must reach with my mind
To loosen the grip of the familiar.
I want to hold your vase
And find all of the unfamiliar blessings it holds,
To feel, to see, to hear, to smell and to imagine
The ancient strangeness of your new world.
My own pots take me deep into the English soil.
They hold the familiar curve of the canal.
Your vase is from fine porcelain,
A different dust from different ancestors.
There is soul connection through water, through colour,
And through hands plunged into the earth,
Through the play of light and dark
And the endless cycle of renewal.
There is connection too
In the voice of your vase,
Here in this strange land
With no words to use,
Asking me to imagine
New meanings for green and for black.