Potsherd

Potsherd

Here is the man who rescued me. He is tall
and tan and everyone calls him Doctor.
He plucked me out of my tomb, all the while
dispensing wisdom to his listening disciples.
And what he tells them is almost right. Of course,
he knows nothing of the woman who made me,
how her hands shaped the clay as she sung me into being.
And though she made others, I knew I was her favorite.
For wasn't it always me she chose to carry clean water,
to feed her only son? But he was right about the battle.
He knows how my life ended in pieces beside
the other debris that once meant an ordered world.

When he took me from the ground, brushing dust
from my reds and blues, I was laid on a table.
If I look carefully to the left, I can pick out another part of me.
And there! That artfully painted spiral once adorned
my bottom. He takes pictures of every fragment,
and I wish that I could one day see the album that will
catalogue my destruction. His hands are gentle, though,
and I have learned to look forward to our time together.
He comes to me in the morning, and no longer entire,
I am uncertain of what I can give him. Sometimes
he sets an empty Dos Equis bottle beside me
in the sunlight. Clear glass blazes here like fire,
but though they are whole, I am important.