Kintsugi is the Japanese art or repairing broken pottery
with epoxy mixed with gold dust.
Cracks and repairs are not hidden but highlighted,
imperfections, part of an object’s life.
Sickly yellow lights the landscape,
like a room lit by an aging lampshade.
Great smoke plumes from Canadian forests,
blanket eastern farms, cities and shores,
swallow a line of green glittering trees
and a neighbor’s brown house
as if the fires are a mile,
and not a country away.
I taste ash on my tongue,
absorb smoke through sinuses,
and wonder about the birds, recently migrated
north across Lake Erie to nest,
On the deck, potted salmon-edged geraniums,
smaller blooms of pink and white,
and spikes of lavender, sit abjectly
in the aberrant light.
Rosemary and thyme rub against
each other in a blue pot with a gold seam.
My sister, the potter who shaped the planter,
repaired it in seven days,
mixing epoxy and resins with gold dust,
painting seams, fitting pieces together,
then aging the repaired pot in a large dark box.
The trick, she said, is to know
that it is even more beautiful repaired.
Burnt ash in the air evokes memories
of not so distant atrocities and tragedies,
yet, seems a hairline fracture
in the ongoing dropping of our world.
Pillaging of nature, wars of aggression,
greed-driven power plays,
hate crimes and death-dealing viruses,
crack the thin ceramic of creation.
Lumpy veins of gold witness
our attempted repairs.
Is there room on this spiderweb
for another seam of gold. And how to start?
Epoxies of novenas and pilgrimages
don’t work anymore.
That god has picked up his play things.
And even if we find the gold dust,
do we have a shoebox large enough?
And will we remember the trick?
Like others who live near or in the New York City area, Chris Reed was not only concerned about the extreme air quality conditions, but eerily reminded of the empty streets during the first year of Covid, and the indelible images of the air over New York after 9/11. Her poems have appeared in Blue Heron Review, US1 Worksheets, and The New Verse News.