Converts
Victor Tapner
In the early 18th century, Père François Xavier d’Entrecolles, a French Jesuit missionary to China, learnt the secret techniques for making porcelain
When first I sailed through the moonlit gorge
I felt I was drifting among furnaces of hell.
Two continents from home, I find myself
on the edge of the world where mountains
look down on a parish of fire.
Kilns roar in every farm and yard.
This is the place where porcelain is born,
miracle of the Orient, fashioned by those
unpractised in our faith to whom I offer
the hand of God. My daily duties take me
to barns where I observe the hand of man
at work. From clays and crude stone
are shaped cups and tea-bowls so delicate
they sing like glass, funerary vases
my converts call ‘jars for souls’
that can shatter at the tiniest slip.
So many pots are lost in firing, plates
warped, jugs sullied, lacquered dishes
discarded for a hairline crack.
Water goblets, thin as a leaf
from the scriptures, crumble in the flames.
For priests in Paris I compile my notes
on the peasants and urchins
who make these masterpieces
that adorn the finest cabinets of Europe,
who sleep in the sheds where they labour,
and the maimed who endure this life
stacking wood and sweeping soot,
only to rest, one aside the other, in pits
of quicklime, until Buddhist monks
burn their bones, and with many benedictions
give back the ashes to the mountain soils.
‘Converts’ draws its background from the ‘Letters of Père d’Entrecolles’, published in William Burton’s Porcelain: Its Nature, Art and Manufacture, 1906, and also published by Canterbury Ceramic Circle, 1995, and on Gotheborg.com.
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Victor Tapner‘s latest poetry publication is Plainsong, a cultural history cycle from Broken Sleep Books. He is also the author of collections Waiting to Tango and Flatlands, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, and Banquet in the Hall of Happiness, winner of the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize. He lives in Essex.
