The eight horses of Mu Wang dessert dish 1775 #2

Punitive English pastoral

Rain sweeps across the Wolds, no sun for a week,

the hall clock chimes, servants laugh in distant corridors,

a boy stares at the dessert bowl, with syllabub still smeared,

forbidden to move for not standing as his father appeared.

He is lost in the curious blue horses with twisted legs

and the strange air-borne creatures on the dish

more fish than bird, more bird than fish;

time passes, hours, days, weeks, years,

until bad blood and gambling leave the family in ruin

and the villagers swarm through shuttered passages

picking the rooms clean.

A Georgian town house

Mrs Greaves entertains in her well proportioned drawing room

her guests discuss the latest Chinese fashion and

Mrs Rand gasps when the Mu Wang dish is seen,

she holds it to finely study the depicted scene

then, politely, in turn, chooses a Queen Cake for her plate

each one, scandalously, in a square tin pan baked,

flour, currants, orange flower water and mace

cut with alum, lead chromate, Plaster of Paris,

bone ash and chalk;

the ladies lick their fingers and begin again to talk.

Five and twenty to nine, Dame School

It is Assembly,

Monday’s cakes, stale by Thursday are thrown into the dish,

hunger makes boys’ minds keen, the strap makes them jump

hard tack sits on the tongue, softened by water from the pump,

with care the prized dessert dish is taken from a shelf,

where it sits beyond the reach of thieves,

a gift from the School Governor Mr Greaves,

white and blue with the border curled

an alien artefact from another world,

to be filled with snap as the boys say Grace

beneath the lesson, plain as day

above the Beadle’s seat.

‘If any would not work, neither should he eat’

(Thessalonians 3:10)

From a wander in Chapel St Leonards

An anniversary stay on this wind scoured coast

and a casual find as the junk shop closed

to take back to their holiday cottage to fill with churros

from the only supermarket for miles about,

to bribe the kids after a big day out.

Now she sees the dish for the first time in natural light

the clarity of the underglaze, the fine blue strokes on white

feels a twinge of guilt, runs her finger around the gilt, as

the girls pile in from playing in the dune

with the wild hunger of a beach afternoon.

In Diglis

Agglomerated with palm oil, soya, lecithin, flavouring,

malic acid, ammonium bicarbonate, salt

cocoa butter, whey and glucose,

from Brazil, Canada and the Ivory Coast.

By the multi-nationals of world trade

these chimera biscuits are made.

Her daughters eat, neither lunch nor tea

a calorific steady stream, a ribbon of food that never ends.

as their homework project is complete

six digestives remain replete, in their new holiday dish,

the exact double of the one they’d seen on display

in the Porcelain Museum earlier that day,

a picaresque survivor placed behind glass

telling a story to those who pass.

 

They shout when she comes in, after a couple of hours,

‘Mum, they’ve got one just like ours’

 

By Brian Comber

Worcestershire poet, admirer of churches, optimist

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