Because I fell

Here is a poem written on-site, outdoors within the beautiful surroundings of the 2023 Raveningham Sculpture Trail, within a Poetry for Women workshop with Helen Vine, and in response to a fallen and broken sculpture.

I feel there are many other connections that could be made to the words here, contexts that they speak of and to. I hope many people would be able to connect their own different individual narratives to the notion of ‘falling’, and the idea of ‘fallen’ being a positive rather than a negative place to be.

It reminds me of kintsugi, the centuries-old Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with beautiful seams of gold, to emphasise the fractures and breaks instead of hiding or disguising them.

https://mymodernmet.com/kintsugi-kintsukuroi/

Because I fell

I lie broken

I cannot move

I don’t know when it happened,

when I woke up like this.

I wonder what I can’t see.

What is around that corner?

What is beyond the brow of the hill?

What is hiding in plain sight?

But I see things that you can’t see,

From your vantage point of high and beautiful and shiny and whole.

I see differently,

Because I fell.

Teresa Smith, September 2023

In response to ‘Happy Monsters’ but Ian Vance