Kitsch
Bought in Tenby,
it was your favourite.
A house made of shells,
mussels for walls,
a scallop painted red for a door.
A bulb in the middle, made a lamp.
in numbers they would have made
a miners terrace.
Mine was a Greek souvenir:
gold lacquered fish,
threaded on blue string.
Out of oceans and gods,
a mythic sea, I would swim Aegean water,
native on an archipelago of islands.
Girls that we were,
we kept them in our house
as treasured possessions.
Solace of small things, to remake
the world as it might be.
Beside the glass chimes
and their wind made aesthetic,
they decorated the room.
Imprinted with different dreams,
quickly, their paint chipped and peeled.
As we too grew apart, lost each other.
Despite, the embroidered endearments
we found in antique shops,
that spelled ‘Home is where the Heart is’,’
or tea poured from
the ornate cottage shaped pot,
the shell house on the mountains,
the fish for all seas.
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Clare Crossman has published three collections of poetry with Shoestring Press. The most recent being The Blue Hour 2017. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies. She recently published Winter Flowers a memoir of the life of Cumbria artist Lorna Graves. She lives outside Cambridge.
