Words turn into pots and pots turn into words.
—Edmund de Waal
Clay
Luis H. FranciaThrow the word on the poet’s wheel,
Write the mud on the potter’s desk.
From bone and ash I need to spin
shapes that sing to us of blood,
Of lives that are more than wisps.
Celadon, faience: I grow stone into
Days, I seed my verse with
Earth. A vase, a bowl, a cup,
The hard ceramic of
Sonnet, haiku seen in clay,
Whatever vessel I choose, may
It transform water into wine
But also simply be—a lyric hewn in
Place, our gaze rendered worthy
Because of it. There welling
From the kiln,
Dwelling of a kin-
dred spirit, the heat of a
God that burns, imparts to a
Life fire and its glaze:
My self stitched into flesh by the word, and
However imperfect, shaped by potter’s mud.
Luis H. Francia is the author of the poetry books Tattered Boat, The Beauty of Ghosts, and Museum of Absences. A member of the New York Writers Workshop, he is on faculty at New York University and at Hunter College.
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