The Jewellery Maker

• ''Each day after sunrise he walks to the workshop''
• ''- like his father before him, and his father too -''
• ''the slap of sandalled feet on heat-baked stone,''
• ''the smell of blossom, a plate-blue sky. He greets''
• ''his neighbours with a smile. In the distance''
• ''a wild dog barks.''
• ''He sits straight-backed, lays out pointed tools''
• ''the way a surgeon might - neat as soldiers.''
• ''He likes hot metal, the smell, the way it yields''
• ''to his touch. Under deft fingers gold butterflies dance;''
• ''flowers bloom; silvery moons wax and wane,''
• ''then wax again; bright dragonflies flap two pairs of wings.''
• ''He likes the tiny loops and curls - he'd decorate''
• ''his house in this, drape his wife in fine-spun gold;''
• ''her skin wrinkled by the sun, in simple cotton dress,''
• ''her only jewellery a plain gold band, worn thin.''
• ''He imagines the women who will wear''
• ''what he has made, clear-eyed, bird-boned, unlined skin''
• ''warming the metal his hands caress.''