Sculpted

Enjoy Sarah Schaeperkoetter 's 2025 second place poem from the Boar's Tusk 2024/2025 Journal. For more information about Boar's Tusk, click here. 

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You are not marble. 

A human is not chiseled cheekbones, flawless features, luscious curves. 

Like something crafted by the hands of the sculptor: 

Michelangelo 

  

You do not stand in the Sistine Chapel. 

With marble garments stiff and solid, 

as proud as a prophet of the Lord.  

Untouched, by time and weather.  

  

A testament of strength and stability, for any camera-flashing tourist, 

or truth-seeking traveler. 

You are not marble. 

  

Marble cannot bend. 

Though strong, if grabbed by the hand of the cruel world and thrown to the cold concrete by fate,  

It will shatter. 

  

Corrupted into a hundred pieces and left: 

To be pieced back together by one with patience enough 

to fill fingers with glue and piece it back to life. 

  

You must be clay. 

You cannot be pristine and perfect, 

Flawless, shining like the whites of that celestial stone. 

  

Enable yourself to be grey. 

To be murky red-brown 

Filled with dirt and dust.  

Plastered with fingertips and feeling- completely flexible. 

  

You must be molded by the sculptor of life. 

The perfect vision of the piece of pottery you are to become. 

  

This lump of clay, lifted up 

And slammed. 

Down onto the potter’s wheel- again- and again- and again- 

 
But you do not break. 

  

Your malleability imbues you with time.  

The potter of life know the plate-bowl-cup-tray-vase that the clay is to become. 

It takes its time and you must too. 

  

To ensure each curve, each lip, 

each handle, each dip 

is perfectly unique to the individual creation that you are. 

  

Clay is not permanent.  

You can start over again- and again- and again- and again- 

In the end: 

You’re still clay.