Home | ( Poetry | Outside ) | Links

"God is Power — 
Infinite,
Irresistible,
Inexorable, 
Indifferent.
And yet, God is Pliable —
Trickster,
Teacher,
Chaos, 
Clay.
God exists to be shaped.
God is Change."
~"Earthseed: The Books of the Living", 
in The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler

You're making yourself out of clay
white stoneware, pure
that fires to a speckled beige,
like water, innocent,
taking what it is given.
What do you want to make yourself?
Every action creating the person that you are,
wide-eyed, fantasizing
so simply
about waking up,
but remember:
here, you were never so innocent.

Making yourself out of clay,
piece by piece, spiral by spiral,
tell the clay what it wants to know
and it will tell you you have done well.
Building yourself out of stones,
clouded quartz,
and in each the refracted world,
all the nuances in a single shard,
bit by bit deciding who you want to be.
You decide,
capture it in words,
dream net out of string,
shine the light through to project it
onto photosensitive paper.
When you've got the image,
sign it in blood, copy it in triplicate,
hand it in

to discover it's too late,
you've already missed the deadline,
skipped the requirements,
already turned into something else.
Sorry, maybe next lifetime.

"Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in
dying life; bright the
hawk's flight on the empty sky."
~ Ursula LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea