Flintful

I love art but don't have the funds to buy it often. So it's fortunate that the fields around the cottage yield so many beautiful things - and all for free.

The house is decorated with gourds, dried cornstalk leaves (like ancient rolled up parchment), stones, pieces of wood - and flints. These I love most of all. They are so plentiful around here - just lying in the fields and in the field margins. They are as individual as stars and snowflakes and I love gazing into their mysterious depths - close up they are constellations, nebulas, whole intriguing worlds, as some of the images below show. One looks like a small foot (fourth image below) and one like the Willendorf venus (image five below) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf She is among my first finds and later I found a child for her - or a partner perhaps, it's a little tall to be a child. At any rate, she has companionship on her shelf. My favourites are (image two below) - a huge five by four inch flint from somewhere in the meadow, unearthed by the Worker Bee - he has a good flint eye and knows what I like. And I also love image three - a flint with a little hole worn clear through it, creating something that looks like a tiny purse. I posed it in front of a dark postcard so the hole is apparent.

You might wonder why, in our clay soil, we have so many flints, which originate in chalk. It's because our clay is shot through with bands of chalk, yielding so many flints that the village church is partly constructed of them, although you have to go into neighbouring Norfolk to find true flint territory and amazing flint churches and cottages. I love to go to the ancient church (first Vicar recorded here in 1272) on a hot day and stand with my hand on the walls - the flints heat up beautifully, a promise of their fire-starting capacity. I love that these seeming passive, stony-dead objects are capable of sparking flame. The rich navies and blacks edged with cream and white, the character of each one amazes me every time. They seem to have personalities of their own and are strangely companionable, like the cottage. They translate from field spoil to work of art very well and people are always asking me what smart gallery they came from. And yet they just lie around in all their beauty, waiting to be picked up. Who needs art?

More on flints here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint

Some of my large and growing collection!

My largest and most loved.....

Complete with hole......

My little foot, though missing its toes.....

My Willendorf Venus and child or partner.................

Constellations........

The Flint

If I lay down

I’d have the worm’s eye view

Across the broken back of the field

More telling than the bird’s

Muscles of ploughed drills

Ripple away to the horizon

Clots of soil and clay

Liquid poolings of clogged matter

Here and there

The sky too dark to fill them with blue

Then blue appears

A solid eye open, unblinking in the soil

Staring out of a hard skull carapace

Gaze calcified over how many thousand years

Prising it out of the ground

Guilty exhumation

A buzzard wheels over and is witness

It cries a warning

Into heedless air

Over undaunted thief

Ripping the eye out of its socket

I get my reward

Blue settles warm in my palm

It has depths

I peer down

Getting my eye in like an astronomer adjusting a telescope

Constellations, nebulas flee away from me

Milky galaxies cloud the deeps

Flecks of debris spin away from the centre

I could stare all day

Into this stonesky

I take it home

Wash it like a prisoner

Being admitted to a jail

Set its bone hardness on my ossuary shelf

Among its flinty gathered sisters

I have trod that earth before

It is itself

Unchanging

The mutable, emotional gourds either side of it

Change with the weather

Darkening on damp days

Lightening on dry ones

The flinty flint

After so long compression

Is a hardened and unreachable soul

As much its changeless self

Indoors

As in the field

So dense accumulations

Happen under many feet

And in space

If no-one seeks

To know a star

Will it harden and

In the interstellar soil

Lie othered

Light undimmed

......and undiscovered....