Howard Firkin
What’s that? What’s hiding in your kitchen clutter?
What’s buried in that drawer of carving forks
and ladles, tongs and chopsticks, plastic corks?
A little copper man, a biscuit cutter:
as golden as the morning sun in Perth.
In early languages, the lost ones, gold
and copper shared a single word with sun.
These either ores were sun on earth, the one
was hard, the other soft; both metals told
and proved the sun once walked upon the earth.
We open every drawer we ever shut.
I feel your palm along my body’s length:
you press me into dough; my shape is cut
into your skin: our sun; our single strength.
What’s buried in that drawer of carving forks
and ladles, tongs and chopsticks, plastic corks?
A little copper man, a biscuit cutter:
as golden as the morning sun in Perth.
In early languages, the lost ones, gold
and copper shared a single word with sun.
These either ores were sun on earth, the one
was hard, the other soft; both metals told
and proved the sun once walked upon the earth.
We open every drawer we ever shut.
I feel your palm along my body’s length:
you press me into dough; my shape is cut
into your skin: our sun; our single strength.
