Elspeth Walker: 'Sea Glass' and 'Orange Kebab Box'
Sea Glass
What allows you to take the title of sea?
I stare as shining fragments, wondering if after all their time in water they are now no sharper
than the water.
I try to imagine a world where they were spat out by creatures below,
like oysters spit forming pearls: we take this as glass to adorn our rooms and skin.
What happens instead is I imagine a drunk man on a beach,
The type next to a seaside town that always seems to be decorated with paint peeling,
And see this young man throw or drop the bottle into fragments,
The waves leach up and consume the offering.
Miles away it is hunted for,
A thing of beauty, a gem, a great find,
That stumbled out of the hands of a working class boy,
Sick of the stagnated seafront,
Foaming like the waves for change,
Only to be offered a bottled beer.
They’ll say that’s how he keeps the beach economy going.
They’ll say he throws the glass for you to find.
Yet this glass will gain the title of the sea,
An infinite place and force.
This broken bottle will become something of value,
He instead will be labelled generational waste.
Orange Kebab Box
Polystyrene,
Archaeologists will see you like we look at Grecian piss pots:
Beautiful artefact
Where in the National Museums will they keep you?
Goodbye ceramics,
Perhaps you will sit next to pyrex and pess dispensers.
There's something so sad in imagining you behind a glass case.
Like dragging a wild animal into a zoo.
You were meant for life,
For lazy afternoons, and messy nights,
The torch light of sustenance to get us home.
Foamy but never absorbing, never taking away that gorgeous grease,
The chips, the cheese, the chicken nuggs,
With a marbling of sauces on top.
That is your crowning moment.
Your final opera.
The life span ends, a finale across the stage, with squeaks as you’re forced into bins,
Or the seagulls call, picking over your remains.
It is not brutal, there is no disrespect.
This is the send off for a warrior of a night raid.
Leave mummies in the ground I say.
Let those who supported the battle, rest on the field in which they were slain.
Elspeth Walker (b.1997, Warrington) is a visual artist and writer, whose work offers an alternative archive as a way to examine class, feminism, memory and spatial understanding.
