Crafters
I went to a reading
And met a poet
Voice like the gentle tugging
Of small lapping waves around toes
On a sandy shore
He said
Craft your writing into something more
Than pain or rawness or emotion
Hone the phrases into something better
I heard him, first thinking
I do not hone or whittle or work
My words flow out of me
Sometimes as if the link
Between mind and hand
Pushed by divine purpose or madness
The moment is there
On the paper
Too sacred to alter, too whole alone
Then, I equated
Each writer with a craft
The poet, he wrote memory and tragedy
Woodworker, etching on a lathe
Words are sawdust at his feet
He polishes and waxes and sands
Producing warm wood beauties
Vessels to hold stories
Pebbles in an oaken bowl
Another woman
Poet, reader
She stitches together stanzas
Taking scraps of time and place
Images that seem random
She quilts them into a pattern
Brilliant color and warmth
You can touch these poems
And wrap them around you
A gruff, bearded man
Face red, wife crying
The beauty from rough hands
He reads, the words soften in his mouth
Hammered out of steel
He smiths and bellows and fires
Each pounding pulls heat back
From the face of history
Personal victory over unyielding past
And me
In the audience
Trembling, I hear and echo
My scribblings furious and reverent
I blow the glass
Twist the molten sand
Fast, so fast am I
But once the moment is passed
It hardens into these words
Murano and brittle and precious.
October 8, 1998
