.png)
13 Apr 2025
Suzi
Feay
Full
Moon
Glass Bone
After a glass replica of a femur
fashioned by an artist friend
The attic’s where I keep my silences
Like half-completed tapestries
Or trophies cupping dust, their ribbons paling.
Wasps upcycle newspapers into nests
Books spill with promises and dares.
Among the baskets and the chests
Boxes of people I no long see:
This study aid to gladden Burke and Hare.
A man (the pelvis tells as much)
With perfect teeth, gated shut
Under their chalky dome of dreams.
We lent his femur to a glass artist.
How it was created I can’t guess
This relic of a see-through child
Ball for a socket, knuckle for a knee
A gravity and a sort of cheat:
Glass is a fluid that will flow
Slower than marrow, DNA or any
Beam in your house of meat.
It lies upon my table now
Transparently malevolent.
I was once sand it seems to say
Fused into a thought by heat
And twisted by the artist’s hand
Into a riddle of enduring matter.
Structures hard to cut can shatter.
Behind the poem...
While studying medicine, my partner was given a partial skeleton for his anatomy studies. There was a skull, its jaw snapped shut with a clasp, a spine, a pelvis, but only one arm and one leg. You couldn’t help wondering who this undersized adult had been – nor how they ended up as a teaching device. A friend, studying for an MA in Art and specialising in glass, asked to borrow the skeleton’s femur for her degree project. As a thank you, she later presented us with a glass bone; smaller than its model, but otherwise accurate. It’s become one of my favourite possessions: enigmatic, beautiful and sinister.