Patti Frankel

If all we ever do is awake love Life,

If all we ever do is take this clay-bound grief—ours, others', this Earth's

Take it and mold it, shape it in our hands until our hands grow red and sore, our knuckles aching and inflamed, our nails encrusted gray, our skin rough like a cat's tongue—

If all we ever do is shape it into – What?

Maybe other sorrow shapes, vessels to hold grief-milk but more round and less distinct (so that others might pick up ours, mistaking it for their own);

Maybe coiled pots to hold surprises and laughter, painted with blood-red runes (our names if we but knew it); or animals: deer, salmon, panther, bear; and other mystery shapes, dots of black, triangles of ochre, milky spirals and undulating blues; or

Maybe a Buddha; maybe a gourd, a drum—

If all we ever do, ever could do, is shape clay like this—this will be enough.

Why? Because prayer is enough, when it is awake and everything.

(We humans do not yet know this.)

And love (which is to say, awakened prayer) is the only act that will save us. Love—

Of clay and the shaping of clay into something awake, alive, whole.

Love, and the coiling together of our dreams.

--Patricia Frankel, October, 2009