Alumina, or a Potter-Mother’s Wisdom Jocelyn Saunders

Alumina, or A Potter-Mother’s Wisdom

Jocelyn Saunders

Once I have washed this clay from my hands, would you raise a toast for this home

I’ve fashioned? From kaolin

and bone ash, I sculpted a dream’s dying light—drawing its febrile, glazed eye into my palms’ wellspring, a haven for this amorphous mass, this ouroboros liminality.

In the firing kiln, I was sintered: porcelain skin crazed and carbonized. I poured lacquer, gold-shocked, into crack and crevice, one-and-all. I marvel at this gamut-run, Kintsugi canvas of myself: imperfect, heavenly body.

Today, you are greenware: untested and malleable, but my hands will teach yours the secrets

of my potter’s wheel. Then, my son, would you raise a toast for me? For I will have given you the very tools to shape the warmth or the winter, the feast or the famine, heedless of which throws its leaden

weight upon your heart in rush or requiem.