Life of Clay

Wetness between thick fingers
is joy for makers;
The wheel, and craft,
a song of hands
immersed in virgin matter,
where water is the soft
and tender lyric
between shaping palm
and substance.

They dance;
she coyly twirls around, around,
while fingers move
with care and mastery,
discrete stripes' motion,
up and down, and down and up again,
within the gentle light harmonic.

What irony
that such delicately
firm, precise, deliberately
perfect motion,
that leads amorphous
into realms of hardened rapture,
should terminate with
immutable, whose only freedom
come in fracture.