TUESDAY POEM | Antarctica by Katherine Glenday

                                      

Sounding bells | 80 feet below the ice - Explorers Cove, New Harbor, Antarctica 2008

Katherine Glenday (with a little help from her friends!) Photograph by Shawn Harper

                                      ANTARCTICA

                                                  Our thoughts form us

                                                  And like the forams

                                                  And the caddis creatures

                                                  We live in our

                                                  Patterned habits

                                                  I can run with this

                                                  And do

                                                  Away from text and fact

                                                  And the common herded wayfare

                                                  Of thought and learned behaviour

                                                  It is too dense for me

                                                  I am overwhelmed already

                                                  And the truth of it

                                                  Scampers off somewhere

                                                  And snarls in the brambles

                                                  Beneath the woods

                                                  Of a forest of trees

                                                  I would rather drop my sounding bells

                                                  Below a frozen sea

                                                  And watch with my long distance heart

                                                  As my friends swim them down

                                                 To sing an angelus

                                                 On the ocean bed

                                                 Here all things are weighed

                                                 In the company of creatures

                                                 Who build their hearts on the sleeves

                                                 Of their houses.

                                                 Katherine Glenday

Katherine and I met at the age of eighteen as we embarked on a degree in Fine Arts at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. Our lives have been woven together in ways mundane, mysterious and magical ever since. During our 2008 season in Explorers Cove, Antarctica, scientist Sam Bowser and I traveled with a series of porcelain forms created by ceramic artists Christina Bryer and Katherine. (You can see some of these on my new, very-much-still-under-construction, website here - scroll down to the bottom of the Antarctica page).

Katherine lives in Kalk Bay, a quaint fishing village in Cape Town (SA). Last weekend she opened the doors of her home and studio to the public for an extensive retrospective - 30 years of her exquisite porcelain work. The words 'numinous' and 'luminous' come immediately to mind. She is an artist in light, her work at once grounded in the natural world and occupying a space that's 'beyond' form. Weightless. Metaphysical. It needs to be seen to be believed --- please visit Katherine's website, prepared to be moved, awed and - yes - altered.

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Janis Freegard

with Tuatara by Nola Borrell

Please click on the quill.