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