Artefact

Creative Future, a local charity that works with marginalized and disabled writers ran a creative writing course at Brighton Museum in January. The following piece is one of the many great pieces of writing that came out of the course. More of the participants’ work can be read in the pamphlet Museum Tales on sale now at the Brighton Museum shop, price £5.

Creative Future run the creative writing workshops in partnership with Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.

You’re my pottery child

I kneaded you from raw clay

I adored you

but you never liked yourself much

you wanted to be

a Grayson Perry earthenware pot

the Wembley turf

John Lennon’s glasses

the Bayeux tapestry

Krakatoa

the Cerne Abbas horny hillside giant

Marcel Duchamp’s urinal

the Venus of Willendorf

the Mariana trench

Tracy Emin’s bed

the Rosetta Stone

a Lalique amber vase

the Seven Sisters

the Shard

Queen Victoria’s vast cotton knickers

the Okavango delta

Frankie Howerd’s last wig

the Cheops pyramid

the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway

the Crab nebula

not this

a stirrup cup circa 1780

in the shape of a half-potato

you brim with disappointment

but look how handsome you are

in your white pearlware

biscuit glaze gleaming

like polished ivory

Tony Spiers