Electrical Storm

Mimi Joung

Ceramics

Dawn an unsympathetic yellow.

Cra-aack! – dry and light.

The house was really struck.

Crack! A tinny sound, like a dropped tumbler.

Tobias jumped in the window, got in bed –

silent, his eyes bleached white, his fur on end.

Personal and spiteful as a neighbor’s child,

thunder began to bang and bump the roof.

One pink flash;

then hail, the biggest size of artificial pearls.

Dead-white, wax-white, cold –

diplomats’ wives’ favors

from an old moon party –

they lay in melting windrows

on the red ground until well after sunrise.

We got up to find the wiring fused,

no lights, a smell of saltpetre,

and the telephone dead.

The cat stayed in the warm sheets.

The Lent trees had shed all their petals:

wet, stuck, purple, among the dead-eye pearls.

by Elizabeth Bishop

45 x 30 x 30 cms (17.72 x 11.81 x 11.81 ins)
Porcelain

£ 2,090.00

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