Kintsukuroi

Kintsukuroi

The art of the golden repair

First I am music:
orchestra electric, rowdy,
loud enough to waken fossils underfoot.
My horns set feathers shaking, 
histories drowning, thunder-headed, 
sprung-floor pounding eight-bar blues, 
a capella when it suits, sweet as vespers. 
And when my sound is torn to dust and whispers

I am drawing, drafting, 
casting loops elliptic round moons
Danish blue and white.
I am neon night, fast-train tracing 
ley lines point to point, 
a lighthouse vector signal
safe to ships on rising water,
until my arcs and structures shatter; 

I am clay, 
vessels domestic, thrown
bowls to chalice seaglass, 
honeypots reaching
a sweetmeat-plattered past.
So much keeping, legacies 
packed in wool, baffled, still
fractured. And if, after all,

I end as bits and fragments,
opus dyslexic, crow-hoard
shards of being, brittle
as a bird’s outstretched wing,
join the riddled anthems, 
missing beats, art to lift 
one life, one heart made whole,
and mend the cracks, the breaks with gold.

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‘Kintsukuroi’ took 2nd place in the Charroux Memoir Poetry Prize 2019 and was first published in Boujour Limosin.

Photo credit: Gen Saratani, www.urushi.info/kintsugi