Tuesday Poem: “Glass Cases (i)” by Christina Stachurski
Glass Cases
i
China was at the bottom of the hole,
a place beyond the water
that came when you dug quite deep.
Sometimes broken off pieces came through,
blue and white and special ones with gold
edges when you washed them under the tap.
“The charm of archaeology
is something that we may happen
to run across but cannot expect to find,”
says a label in the Beijing Capital Museum.
When the scholar Liu E examined his sick
friend’s medicine in 1899, he noticed markings
on the bones – to be ground into powder –
similar to ancient bronze inscriptions.
Lui’s further discovery – that such oracle
bones were anointed with blood, inscribed
with a question, heated until cracked
and read by royal diviners – proved the existence
of the Shang dynasty some 1,500 years BC.
As we leave, I am surprised with a present
from the Museum’s store, a smooth white
porcelain bone painted with blue leaves and lotus
before firing; one end smashed off to reveal
the hollow interior, the roughness of unglazed clay.
Yang Jiechang calls this piece Underground Flowers.
(c) Christina Stachurski
Published in Flap: The Chook Book 2, 2010
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About the Poem:
This is another Tuesday Poem selection from the recently released Flap: The Chook Book 2 by Christchurch poets Victoria Broome, Catherine Fitchett, Barbara McCartney and Christina Stachurski. (I hope to being you a Tuesday poem from each of them over the next few weeks.) Glass Cases 1 is from Christina’s section of the anthology: the charm of archaeology. I chose to feature it because it picks up the theme of Victoria’s poem last week, around travel in China, and because of it’s different but complementary slant on the sense of continuity and story through poetry.
About Christina:
My ancestors arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand from England (1841–1911), Scotland (1842), Ireland via the Australian goldfields (1864 and 1871), and Poland (then Prussia) in the 1870s, and included Catholics, Anglicans, and Methodists. They settled variously on the West Coast and in Nelson, Taranaki, and Auckland, working as farmers, millers, mothers, storekeepers, domestic servants, masons, flax-cutters, publicans or miners. In the last few years, I’ve got into family history and travelling. Luckily, I get paid for thinking about identity and literature while teaching Modern Drama and Creative Writing at the University of Canterbury.
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The continuity between last week’s poem and this week’s Tuesday poem is seamless, Helen. This poem moves so effortlessly from the imaginings of a small child with that stunning spare first stanza ‘China was at the bottom of the hole’ to some pretty hefty history. Helen, thank you for posting this series of poems. I am going to endeavour to seek out Flap for further reading!!
Thank you, Elizabeth! My personal view is that Flap is well worth the seeking out–I’ll see if I can find out where it’s available.