I broke a dish today,

a little blue dish

just large enough to hold

in the cupped palm of my hand.

 

The colour, soft aqua blue.

A good colour, cool yet warm

to receive yoghurt, soup,

all kinds of pureed fruit.

 

I loved this dish not least

because my son

bought it for me

Oh yes, I miss

 

my dish and I wish I hadn’t let the glass jar slip

from my fingers and come crashing down

on my little dish which had done nothing

to deserve such absent–minded destruction.

 

I howled. The loss was sad.

Then I thought how much more sad

to lose all my crockery, pieces on which

I had served meals for my family,

 

How much more sad

to pick over the debris

of a whole kitchen, a history

of all that care, in pieces.

 

Favourites. Treats

for the children.

The children.

Children.

 

How much more sad

to pick over the bones

of those you fed believing

they would grow strong and thrive.

 

How much more sad

to sit weeping over

broken parts of a child

who will never be whole.

 

I have placed the pieces

of the little blue dish

on the window sill

to be warm, to shine.

Amanda Rackstraw trained at RADA and worked as an actor before moving to Wales. Following an MA at Cardiff University she taught creative writing in the Department of Continuing Education there until 2017. Her work has been published in various journals including Planet, New Welsh Review, Poetry Wales, Mslexia, Acumen, Modron, most recently with Broken Spine. She has a poem on a sculpture in Dunraven Bay…. Amanda is working on a collection.

 

 

Main photo by the author.