STUDIES (2012)
SCREW
Streaky veined; I don’t know how a rock; the cooled product of magma, lava; I don’t know which.
I don’t know how this was crushed and extracted and turned into this shiny, spiral whirled, screw.
The cross at its head is bisected by smaller diagonal indentations and I don’t know why.
When I test the tip I am surprised by its sharpness.
The screw driver slips into the slot. I twist it and the metal turns and sinks into the wood.
As the head meets the surface the friction increases. I increase the pressure until eventually the screw driver flicks out and a small sliver of steel lifts from the shiny edged surface.
CHALK
Dust drifts down the blackboard as a million, million skeletons are scraped onto blackness
And out of their dark history, buried in the drifts of a warm shallow sea,
Out of their silence and my ignorance of their brief lives,
Come words, words that we wee children, recite together as the sun spears the dust in the still air.
The chalk breaks, leaving a jagged edge and a brief smear on the board that is quickly wiped away.
PEG
This tiny plastic peg with its sliver of a metal spring could be used to hold sheets of paper together. It is too small to hang clothes. It wouldn’t even do for silky slips of something delicate to hang from the finest line.
It will probably be lost soon; maybe dropped on the floor to be sucked up when I vacuum the sitting room.
Once trees and ferns and grasses fell and built up layer upon layer of peaty swamp that grew and grew until the weight of the earth turned it liquid and it sat, poured into rock; waiting for the roar of the drill that would extract it and ultimately lead to this.
For a brief moment I practice opening and closing it; feeling the surprising resistance as I press against its opposing pieces.
POPPY
I used to pop the black centre that held the red paper to the green plastic. I would pop it open and take out the paper petals and then put them all together again. By the time I had finished the poppy was crumpled and soggy; fibrous almost; not really worth putting in my lapel to go to the school church service.
My teachers taught us the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. We read about all the horrors and the complete lack of quietness on the Western Front and then we were taken to church to celebrate the sacrifice of the dead.
Perhaps it wasn’t surprising when, later on, I refused to buy poppies at all.
And maybe even later that I read and read; Anne Frank, Primo Levi, David Grossman and felt confusion that murder can justify murder.
I wanted to join the UN peacekeeping force without being part of a countries army.
I was very ignorant. I still am.
BUSINESS CARD
Someone gave this business card to the person who put it in this box. They maybe felt a sense of pride that; printed on the stiff, white rectangle was their name and the address of their business.
Once the card was a tree. I wonder where it was growing? Perhaps Scandinavia; where the snow falls and the northern lights flicker in the star lit night. And then it was felled and pulped and turned into a card to advertise a picture framing service for a business which will fell more trees and turn them into more spindly rectangles on which, it is quite likely, we will place pictures of those mountains and trees.
BOX WITH RUBBER BAND
This clear plastic box contains ideas. It contains concepts. It teaches us about memories and stories yet to be told. Each object was once manufactured out of things that were trodden on, out of things that swam in silky ,warm, salty water and dissolved in peaty swamps. Their constituents have stories like we have stories for the objects they make and for the symbols these objects mean to us but they have lived for millennia in the deep, dark earth and no one knows just what their story is anymore.
The rubber band holds it all together. Once it would have been harvested from the sap of a tree in Malaysia; now I have no idea how it is made and what holds it together.
(Photo: Screws from the shed 11 2020)
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