Pondering Clay

Most of my poems have a backstory, as some of my previous blog posts will show.  This one, on the other hand, was an assignment in my sophomore English class.  We were told to write a poem using figurative language, but we weren’t given a topic.  That day I happened to be thinking about clay (because normal people spend their free time pondering clay), so that’s what I wrote about.  I was fairly happy with the results, and went on to read this in my second poetry slam.

The Potter

If you were to task a potter,

To sculpt an accurate human,

He would take it seriously, I’m sure,

And think about it through the day.

He would pull a chair to his window,

And look out over the world,

Determining what to use,

And how to proceed.

He may use red clay for the skin,

Glass for the eyes,

Porcelain for the mind,

And the heart would be mache.

The red clay would be soft in the beginning,

Easy to bend, simple to warp,

But as the fires from around it raged,

The skin would harden and become brittle.

Glass would allow the person to see out,

But also allow others to see in,

And as the ages passed, the glass cloudy,

The life seen lived would remain inside.

The mind would be white porcelain,

Strong under pressure, yet delicate to touch,

But porcelain is quite beautiful,

Depending on the hand that made it.

Mache takes time to perfect,

Layers upon layers at a time,

And if it is broken, splintered, or cracked,

It’s almost impossible to repair.

The potter looked in awe at his replica,

And realized he had sculpted himself,

His skin was warped and brittle,

His eyes holding nothing within,

His mind there, absent of blue paint,

And his heart, a single torn layer.

All of this, created by the hands around him,

But never by his own.

No more, he decided,

And placed his figure in the window.