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.