The Potter's Wheel Poem by Mark Heathcote

I've put love on a potter's wheel
and applied it with a sprinkling of words.
Shaped terracotta like a goldsmith,
held their bars, their molten innards.

Their bodies are ingots, shimmering.
Pictures framed, with a touch of gold leaf
till like the climbs of a silver moon
they're etched in a hoary cloud's relief.

Sculptured like melting snow
I've felt their pearls slip back on the necklace.
And like a tree of blossom
all are swept into an ocean, powerless to return
Like a vessel smashed into a million pieces.

Where somewhere in the distance
another potter's hands with reverberating laughs
goes about reshaping every grain of sand in the hourglass
in prayer sits smoothing
vessel upon vessel once ruined in too pure a light.