Not Just Mud - a trilogy
Not just mud i
It all started with pulling my
Fingers free from the mud
Abandoned at low-tide
Dark, tacky, sweet-smelling
Mud to sink toes and feet in
But at my age then,
I wanted to be a crab
So, immersing toes and fingers
Side-slipping, I chased the
Outgoing tide until…
…it was the sight of a
Real, live, salty red crab
That stopped me:
Curiosity pulled at my fingers
Until, with a thwook,
Out of the mud they came
I took hold of the hard edges
Of the crab’s crusty shell
And let its flailing legs
Make patterns in the mud-ripples
Before baptising it
In a pool and letting it
Get clean away, then it was back
To plunging my fingers in then out
I wondered even then:
What could I make with mud?
Mud: the impotent left-overs
The detritus of decay
Washed here and there
By forces too strong to resist
Wind, tidal surges, estuary madness
Mud: weak, wet, and worthless
But my fingers went to work
First a handful, squeezed
Until the sea stopped draining free
I looked at the grey-brown sphere
Formed between my palms until
It was a scoop of ice cream…
Next? Something like a cone
Squeezed and rolled, emerged
It all ended with Mother
Picking me up
Mud still in my hands
And between my toes until
I was bath-baptised and got
Clean away…to bed, dreaming
Of mud-men and mud-women
Majestic and mighty
Not just mud ii
The years passed by
And mud had turned to clay
And clay had turned to stone
And the stone had turned
Into sculptures
Of tall men and tall women
Striding across long grass
Leaving behind an evolution
If not an evolution
Then a metamorphosis
My gnarly fingers
And swollen joints testifying
Of a lifetime sculpting
Making a fading dream
Become impervious
A vision taking on solid forms
Of a people, a stone race
Of magnificence rising up
From all that’s unseen
Beneath the soles
Of our shoes. Sixty years it took
Before halted again,
Not by a crab but
At my god-likeness
Not just mud iii
My brother was a doctor
My sister a warrior
In low moments I thought
I had wasted my life-clock
Felt like grey-brown mud
Squeezed dry by the world
Just a scoop of nothing much
A sculptor barely scraping by
It was not a voice I heard
But something
Not an angelic visitation
But each cell of my body
Began to exult - I saw
The loving hand of God
Reaching down into the poor
And broken mud-people we are
And yielding, if we will, to the
Divine finger-moulding-pressing
We rise, like wet clay on a wheel
Into the mud-men, and
The mud-women
Of a four-year-old’s dream
The weak, wet, and worthless
Now tall, mighty, and magnificent