Poster poems: clay

That from which the first man was made, or the ground in which nothing grows … clay has associations with both creation and decay. Send us your poems about the sticky stuff, either way

When you hear the word “soil”, you tend to think of growth, organic life, fertility. “Clay” is another matter entirely. It’s dead, sticky and wet, it sucks you down, nothing grows in it, it’s useful only to the potter. While this may be a little unfair to the stuff, I suspect that this is how most of us view it.

But there is another side to clay. In the Bible creation story, as in many other similar myths, God made the first man from clay, and this association of clay and flesh endures in modern literature.