If Poets Were Potters entry #3

If 

by Redware Kipling

If your hands can hold steady while ten pounds of clay

Is spinning and bucking and having its way

If your first concern isn’t “What does it pay?”
And you can work twenty-four hours a day

If you are part painter, part sculptor, part test
Pilot, chemist, plumber, electrical whiz

If you can hope and can dream with the best

But keep that all real to manage a biz

If you can talk to crowds and sell your wares

Treating kings and common alike in the end

If you can serve people who share common cares

Trade glaze recipes or stoke fires with a friend

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With a mug – thrown and completely done

Once from the Earth, but changed as you spin it

Then you can be a potter, my son

Or daughter

Whatever.

If Poets Were Potters entry #2

RAVIN'
by Edgar Plastic Kaolin

Once upon a midnight dreary
Eyes rimmed red, bloodshot, and bleary
Again my kiln is in no hurry
Waiting on the cones once more
So far I’ve barely bent cone 4
Only this and nothing more

Nodding off just kills my neck it
Dawns on me I ought to check it
Pull the peep hole from the back it
Shows a slightly bent cone four
Still a slightly bent cone four
Only this and nothing more

Maybe I’ll adjust the damper
This kiln's causing me to hanker
For a kiln I need not pamper
Computer-controlled so to ensure
I’d never again be stuck at four
Just cone four and nothing more

I’ll admit, I’m mildly pissed off
A month’s production will be kissed off
If this rocket never lifts off
But stays right here, stuck at cone four
Only four, and nothing more
It’s no wonder I stay poor

If Poets Were Potters entry #1

Pottery Fever
apologies to John Masefield

I must go down to the shop again, to the pottery, to the clay
And all I ask is a quiet wheel, good music throughout the day,
Warm water for my hands, and well-wedged clay, wooden tools honed sharp and right,
And bat pins drawing my throwing discs down so my first pull doesn't take flight.

Tall Tales We Tell Ourselves

“Every lie you ever tell will be found out”, he said. “Every last one of them. You may be in control of your life, but not of your biography. And that’s true whether you write it yourself or not. In fact, your lies will leak out of your words faster if you write them yourself. Another might grant you the grace of continuing one of your deceptions. Maybe even most of them. But don’t fool yourself. They’ll be figured out.

So here’s an idea. Lie for others, not yourself. Advance their goodness even when you’re sure it’s not there. Be more mindful of your shared humanity than your rectitude. It’s not naïveté. It’s grace.”