a sculpture of words

the form within

sometimes I have the sculptor’s eye:

what I’ve heard is the sense

to see the shape within the stone,

the form who wants to shape itself from the formless,

in another’s eye I can often see a gleam

of someone awesome within

who wants to dare to come out,

as I work with students in my classes,

what I see is order beginning to be set free

from the chaos of circumstance and hormones and bad decisions,

there’s a lot of detritus that gets cast away in the carving,

I find far more discarded chips than arrowheads

when I search ground where native peoples worked the stone

to bring forth what they needed,

what they wanted,

what they saw and caused to be,

I hold in my hand now a novel written by a former student

who found greatness potential within her

and dared to work the years necessary to bring forth

a sculpture of words to hold against

the entropic dissolution that seeks to deny the sculptor’s vision.

by Henry H. Walker

May 16, ’14